There’s little guaranteed to get veins pumping on the necks of the great, full-breakfast-eating, Clarkson-chuckling, rights-demanding British public more than the notion of asylum seekers being housed in hotels.

The image of a bunch of brown-skinned freeloaders lounging by the pool, with room service on speed dial – all at the expense of hard-working, mainly English, taxpayers – is enough to get angry mobs baying in Farage admiring pockets across this sceptred isle.

While for most, a strongly worded letter to the Daily Mail might be enough to assuage their fury, at least temporarily, the more hateful have felt motivated to lob Molotov cocktails at such hotels.

They do so, presumably on the warped assumption that they would rather see them, and their occupants, burned to the ground than to operate, for a moment longer, in the service of parasitical foreigners.

Of course, the reality is somewhat different. Anyone who has been near any accommodation servicing asylum seekers will attest that it is a joyless, inhospitable environment, pared to the essentials of human amenity.

Read more by Carlos Alba

The rooms are grimly functional; public areas are barren, secured by paid guards; meals are a bland and unvarying choice of rice or pasta. Occupants are given soap, toothpaste, and a toothbrush upon arrival. They may have to share showers. Women can request sanitary products, but they are not always forthcoming. Otherwise, they receive nothing. The Ritz, it is not.

Last week, Sir Keir Starmer announced that he is to end the practice of housing asylum seekers in hotels. His commitment may have led to the clinking of pint glasses in Wetherspoons branches across the country, but for most of........

© Herald Scotland