SCOTTISH Labour's last surviving MP has likened the party to the Titanic.
Shadow Scottish Secretary Ian Murray said the party was in a "mess" after its virtual wipe-out at the general election.
In an interview with the Sunday Herald the day before Jim Murphy's resignation as leader, the Edinburgh South MP also warned a breakaway Scottish party, as some members have suggested, was not the answer to Scottish Labour's deep problems.
He said: "I don't abide by that whatsoever. The hundreds of thousands of people who turned away from Labour last Thursday are not going to go, 'That's the answer'.
"It's rubbish. It's just all chatter and talk. We need to reconnect with people and regain their trust, not move the deckchairs on the Titanic, that's the problem we've got."
Extending the metaphor, he added: "I think we've hit the iceberg already, haven't we?
"Jim was the captain when it was already heading for the iceberg. And he's been frantically trying to turn the tiller and not being quite able to do it."
Murray also criticised the "backstabbing" which has convulsed Scottish Labour, but then took a swipe at Lothians MSP Neil Findlay for troublemaking.
Findlay, who was Murphy's key left-wing rival for the leadership, last week resigned his shadow cabinet post, saying "radical solutions" were needed to fix the party, but stopped short of calling for Murphy to quit.
Referring to the bid by unions and some MSPs to force Murphy out, Murray said: ""People just need to reflect on where we are, and turning in ourselves isn't the answer. "The Labour party's been great in history at turning in on ourselves.
"We're brilliant at that. We should be gold medallists for it. And all the people who didn't want Jim in the first place now need to think why we're in this mess."
He went on: "We need to be talking to people out there, listening to what they've got to say, regaining their trust.
"And we're not going to do that by finding as television camera and saying on TV that we should be getting rid of our leader in a backstabbing fashion.
"I find it incredibly bizarre that the person who lost the leadership election is now calling for Jim to go but doesn't want to be leader and doesn't know who should be.
"At least meet us halfway and give us some of the answers."
Scottish Labour's sole MP since the loss of 40 seats to the SNP last week, Murray said Labour had failed to explain what it stood for, using technical manifesto policies that didn't say how the party would change people's lives.
In contrast, the SNP made an "emotional" connection with voters by offering aspiration and hope - albeit based on impractical "simple answers" to complex problems.
He said: "We're in an emotional problem at the moment. People have been through a particularly hard time since 2008.
"I think the Labour party across the UK not just in Scotland needs to reconnect with people emotionally as well as practically.
"Politics should be about aspiration and hope, shouldn't it? And the only party that was offering aspiration or hope, whether it be practical or irrational, was the SNP."
Labour's manifesto had been "responsible and credible, which is much more difficult to sell than a couple of emotional phrases that make it look easy," he said.
SNP Business Convener Derek Mackay said: "Labour's disarray - at both Westminster and Holyrood - underlines that the real opposition to the Tory government can only come from the SNP."
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