Owen Jones, 22, Marsha-Jane Thompson, 26, Tim Flatman, 22, Mary Partington, 22 and Vino Sangarapillai, 25, are extremely clear about the Labour party's options, or option: socialism is Labour's future. Blairism, on the other hand, strikes them as tantamount to political suicide, what with its thousands of dead Iraqis, collapsed party membership, flaming thirst for a lengthy rape of the public sector by the private one, burgeoning list of cash-for-honours deliquents, et cetera. Everybody normal, they say, knows that they're seeing the end when they look at Blairism.

'Opinion poll after opinion poll shows that people support the Public Not Private campaign ,' says the articulate Jones. 'We ran an opinion poll that showed only 17% of people support privatisation of public services. Three-quarters of the population supports renationalisation of the railways , and the war in Iraq - two million people marched against it. All [of these people] are left out completely in the cold from the political establishment. It's absurd.' You'd do your head in, Jones says, trying to get it around Gordon Brown, crazy John Reid, Blair himself, and that weird and wonderful group of Blairite/Brownite hangers-on, wonks and toadies who genuinely think that the masses are dying for more, but who should have been at least a year in the crash position by now.

'Even (declared deputy-leader candidate) Jon Cruddas has realised that we need to reconnect with [the party's traditional supporters],' Jones grins. Cruddas has made a reasonable online impact with his calls for a renewed focus on inclusive politics, with a special emphasis on leaving the warm confines of the Houses of Parliament, and getting out amongst it to knock on constituents' doors. Jones says that'll only work if the candidates who do the knocking have sensible things to say on topics like keeping the NHS public, providing affordable housing and a living wage, but this group does think that Cruddas' recent, if teetering, steps are headed in the right direction.

'He used to be New Labour,' says Thompson, 'but he's actually learned because of what's happened [the pressure for socially-responsible policy] in his constituency.'

John McDonnell is the man as far as everybody in this group is concerned. Most of them support and/or are working on, McDonnell leadership campaign. They refuse to accept that their support of a left-wing candidate means they're terminally deluded. Delusion is for the young Blairites, they say - they're the ones, after all, who are falling over themselves to follow Tony and Gordon off the plank.

This group says their numbers prove a shift to the left for Labour is not only feasible, but well underway. These numbers come and go a bit throughout the afternoon, and are anecdotal at best for now, but here they are: hundreds of emails of support to the John4Leader campaign website, 220 members of an online discussion group on McDonnell in its first few weeks as opposed to 80 on one for Gordon Brown, more people signed up for the launch of a new Socialist Youth Network next week than attended a recent London Young Labour City Hall event sponsored by Unison, and great, if hard-to-quantify, youth enthusiasm for organising upcoming John4Leader events in Norwich and Great Yarmouth.

This group thinks that McDonnell, with his anti-war, free education, pro-union, pro-public services platform, strikes a chord particularly with youth who were politicised by the Iraq War. Partington, a recent Oxford graduate who has been a party member since last summer and works in McDonnell's office, says that she found no comparable outlet, even though she spent a long time looking.

'I was what you would call a drifter. I was going along to various demos or whatever from when I was about 12 years old. I developed a belief in socialism and struggled to find a place where I could be active and struggled to find a place where I could partake democratically. On the one hand, you had the Labour party which went to war with Iraq. That was something so demoralising for a young person who went out on a march with millions of people, and then for that not to count for anything. [On the other hand] you had extreme, small organisations [on the political left] which I also felt didn't represent my views.' She says that's the reason politicised youth tends to work on issue-based campaigns like Stop the War and climate change, rather than join political parties -'People and Planet is one of the most successful things in Oxford.'

Tradition still plays its part in drawing a few people in: Flatman, for instance, remembers the party's history as the people's party and seems to view Blairism as an interruption to that history, rather than a terminal departure from it. Flatman is unemployed at the moment. He joined the Labour party six years ago, and says he is 'slightly more optimistic than everybody else [here], because in my area where I joined, which is Wakefield in West Yorkshire, the local Labour party was doing stuff for people where I lived. My first political memories are [of] going canvassing with the local Labour party, trying to get central heating for people who didn't have it and stuff like that. They were standing for people who didn't have anything, [the people] who had been screwed over by everyone else.'

Flatman thinks there is plenty of room for that ideology in a post-Blair world. 'I want better affordable housing, and asylum seekers to be defended and not pillioried, and people to be paid the kind of wages that they deserve, rather than having to work 50 or 60 hours a week.'

Jones says tradition's the reason that he's there as well - 'otherwise, the Labour party is the last place that I would have joined. [I would have been put off by] the policies that New Labour has pursued - education fees, topup fees, policies that criminalised young people like ASBOS, and then more widely, the Iraq war, which politicised so many young people.' Jones is a Masters student at Oxford, and works part-time on McDonnell's campaign team. He joined the party in 2000, when he was 15. Both of his parents (his mother was an academic, and his father worked for Sheffield City Council in economic regeneration) belonged to the party and were involved in the Young Socialists group as it was then.

Jones agrees that the trend right now is for politicised youth to focus on single-issue campaigns, like Stop the War , or Public not Private. 'People have no natural political home.' Even young Blairites do a good line in single-issue campaigning, Jones grins. 'Like, you'll find that they'll support all Blairite policies except for tuition fees.'

Thompson's special interest is making union affiliation to New Labour work for union members, rather than New Labour. She's a youth worker, the UNISON Greater London Regional Young Members Convenor, and Unison's National Young Members Forum member. Thompson did join the Respect party briefly, when she was looking to participate in politics, but she was only active in that party for a couple of months. 'It wasn't really what I was looking for,' she says tactfully.

'Respect is pretty much a party in decline,' Jones grins, a little less tactfully.

Thompson agrees that the conservative aspects of Respect's programme leave socialists a little cold. 'In Tower Hamlets Respect, there have lately been the leaflets that they (the Respect party) have been putting around about the Labour councillors on the council not letting them talk about closing sex clubs down. (Respect in Tower Hamlets recently launched a campaign to close the clubs). That is really sort of rightwing.'

Thompson joined the Labour party about 14 months ago, 'mainly because of my work with the unions. I started getting involved in union work at a regional level and I found that there were a lot more people in the Labour party (at Unison regional level) and they were working to try and change the party.' She is especially interested in pressuring for changes to the dynamic of Unison's Labour link - the dynamic that presently involves the union paying substantial money to the Labour party, which then ignores the policies that the union and indeed the Labour party vote for at their various conferences. The shonky punters on the winning end of the cash-for-honours scandal get splendid returns for their generous donations. Union members, in Thompson's view, get bugger-all for theirs.

'They're pissing on us,' Thompson grins. '[The Labour link] is dominated by Blairties. I thought I should be a Labour party member as well [as a union member] and decide where that money goes to in the Labour link. The membership is completely annoyed and it's inspiring them to get up and do something about it. One young member who is 18 is running for the [Unison] NEC on a left platform.' Thompson herself is running for an NEC seat for the London Region. 'It's inspiring a lot of us, knowing that we're going to take our union back.'

Hear, hear says Sangarapillai. Sangarapillai is committee clerk in local government, and he is not best pleased with local government in Blairite times, or the evil effects that the Blairite era has on an already-beleagured public-sector workforce.

'I've noticed from my (council) union work the way that certain workers have been contracted out - they have been parcelled out with contracts, and it's been more difficult for the union to organise.' New Labour's spectacular failure to address any aspect of Thatcher's anti-union legislation has been specially bad news. 'We thought they [the Blair government] would have made it easier for unions to take secondary (sic) action, but it retains the conservative legislation, which has made it easier for employers to hire and fire.'

Sangarapillai joined the Labour party when he was 17, largely because he found the 1999 version of Blair impressive. 'It seems a while ago now,' he grins. 'I've been dismayed at the direction of the party and the fact that the right has taken over.'

The right will certainly take over if the Tories come, says Thompson: that's a fight that the left needs to be ready for. 'It's the contrast between David Cameron's fluffy Tories and what the Tories are actually doing.' She holds Hammersmith and Fulham Council up as a special example, as a growing number of people do. Labour lost Hammersmith and Fulham at the May 2006 local elections. Just eight months later, Hammersmith and Fulham's new Tory administration has rid itself of commitee and advisory staff, proposed to sell schools for property, put IT staff into a joint-venture company with the council's private-sector strategic partner, disbanded its joint staff negotiating forum and removed references to the Disability Discrimination Act from council sickness procedures. 'And New Labour wants to fight for those voters who believe in this.'

Choice, says Jones, rolling his eyes to the skies. 'The [New Labour] MPs and their public school media allies talking about choice, as though anybody in the country has any interest in talking about the fucking choice agenda. It's an absolute joke.'