Picture this: Londoners beg for pennies from wealthy foreigners, former Oxford professors hawk toilet paper in the streets, tourist buses run over children in the street, scared that stopping will lead to them being attacked.

This is the bleak future portrayed by Francis Beckett’s new play, The London Spring, and while it’s clearly fictional, the journalist and playwright believes his vision may not be that far off the mark.

We had the Prague Spring in 1968 and the Arab Spring in 2011 – where did the idea of a ‘London Spring’ come from?

“From two areas,” Francis explains. “From looking at what’s happening here now – youth unemployment is 22.2% at the moment and that’s fuelling a lot of anger and alienation. One feels, with a few more years of economic downturn and neo-liberal government, this is where we’re headed.

“The second part came from holidays in Third World countries. I was in Egypt and there were people trying to sell me scraps of toilet paper, one square each as the tourists went into the toilets. That sort of desperation – what does it do to people?

“Most of the tourists perceive people living that way as slightly less than human – and in return, these people perceive them as slightly less than human. I’m interested in that relationship.”

The play, which Francis describes as an ‘acid comedy’, follows the fortunes of a well-off American doctor paying his first visit to London, where he is robbed of a case containing important medical drugs that are not available in the UK. The story is his attempts to get the case back, and who he encounters along the way.

“It’s about people who aren’t the traditional underclass – they’re people like you and me,” says Francis. “We think, because we have work and don’t have to worry about where our next meal is coming from, that being utterly poor is something from another planet – but it isn’t. Real, extreme poverty is coming to a town near you. It’s not terribly far off unless we do something about it.”

Francis is a journalist, editor, author, contemporary historian and broadcaster. The 66-year-old, from Finchley Central, has written 17 books and 4 plays and contributes to a number of newspapers and magazines, including The Times and the magazine for the University of the Third Age, which he edits.

After a lifetime in politics – he was a member of the Labour Party from the time he left university in 1969 until the time of the Iraq war and was involved in a number of trades unions – he still retains an interest, but his active involvement is ‘dead’, he says.

“I wish I hadn’t got involved,” he muses. “What I forgot after university was that I’m only really good at writing – I had no political skills at all. I’m sorry I spent so much of my life trying to do it.”

Now that he’s at the age when most people are thinking about retiring, Francis is looking to redress that. “I’m making up for a lot of time – all that great clump of my life I spent doing what I wasn’t very good at. Now I’m going to spend what’s left of it doing what I’m really good at – writing.”

London Spring is at Etcetera Theatre, above the Oxford Arms pub, Camden High Street from Tuesday, March 6 to Sunday, March 25 at 7.30pm from Tuesday to Saturday and at 6.30pm on Sundays. Details: 020 7482 4857, www.etceteratheatre.com