“Cramped” and “dangerous” conditions discovered in asylum hotels by the BBC have offered a counterpoint to a claim by “This Morning” presenter Rylan Clark that migrants are enjoying four-star luxury.

Journalists “aren’t normally allowed inside the hotels”, wrote Sue Mitchell, but “I gained access through migrant contacts” to find out what life is really like at these contentious locations.

Are migrants being housed in luxury?
Clark claimed newly arrived migrants get taken to a “four-star hotel”, and former immigration minister Robert Jenrick previously claimed that asylum hotels are “luxurious”. But when hotels are taken over for asylum accommodation, most of the facilities are stripped away and a security desk takes the place of reception. The resulting conditions can leave people “despondent and suicidal”, Nazek Ramadan, director of Migrant Voice, told The Guardian in 2023. The charity shared accounts of “filthy rooms, abusive and obstructive staff and ‘dangerously erratic’ healthcare”, and some people reported being “crammed into rooms with more than 10 strangers”.

What else can they get?
Migrants are usually offered financial support of £49.18 per person per week, loaded onto a card, for essentials such as food, clothing and toiletries. But if meals are provided with accommodation, that drops to £9.95 per week. Additional payments are available for pregnant women or families with young children, but Migrant Voice reported that many of the children couldn’t go to school because they “didn’t have shoes, and their parents had no way to afford them”.

Asylum seekers are not allowed to work or claim benefits while their cases are being assessed, although some told the BBC that they “had no choice” but to work illegally for pay as low as £20 a day in order to pay off debts to people smugglers. Residents may access free NHS healthcare but the Home Office does not provide iPads or mobile phones to asylum seekers, as claimed by Clark. That is a “complete myth”, refugee law specialist Daniel Sohege, the director of human rights consultancy Stand For All, told the Big Issue.

More than 32,000 migrants are currently staying in hotel rooms, regarded as “contingency accommodation”, down from 51,000 in 2023. The government has pledged to end the use of asylum hotels by 2029.

The Royal Parks and RSPCA have dismissed allegations by Nigel Farage that swans are being stolen and eaten by “people who come from countries where that’s quite acceptable”. His comments, in an interview with LBC, are the latest in a long history of similar dubious claims.

Old legends
The “dog eater” trope is a “fearmongering tactic white politicians have long deployed against immigrants of colour, particularly those of Asian descent”, said The Guardian.

“Racists have long twisted dietary rules to divide people and dehumanise immigrants,” said Cornell University lecturer Adrienne Bitar on The Conversation. The “myth of eating pets traces back to old legends”, including that Asian immigrants in the US were capturing and cooking people’s pets. More recently, in 2016, the Oregon county commissioner and a US Senate hopeful, Faye Stewart, accused Vietnamese refugees of “harvesting” dogs and cats for food.

Corrosive consequences 
The consequences of these sorts of stories can be “serious”, said Bitar. In 2024, a rumour that a Laotian and Thai restaurant in California cooked pit bulls led to “such vile harassment” that the owner moved the restaurant to a new location. Donald Trump’s claim that illegal immigrants from Haiti were eating domestic pets in Ohio made the community a target of bomb threats and forced city buildings and schools to close.

After Trump’s allegation hit the headlines, social media was “flooded” with “AI-generated images” of him holding kittens and ducks and sometimes “carrying them away from Black people giving them chase”, said Slate. “There’s no dog whistle here – the bigotry is open and gleeful.”

The consequences of such rumours aren’t “abstract” but “corrosive”, said Alexandra Jones in The Independent. They “feed prejudice” and “normalise the idea that entire groups can be smeared without proof”. Political discourse is also degraded, because if a party leader can “traffic in tales from the internet’s underbelly, why should anyone else stick to the truth”?

Trucks sink into mud left after Super Typhoon Ragasa caused a barrier lake to burst its banks in eastern Taiwan’s Hualien county. The deadly storm has wreaked havoc across the Philippines, Taiwan and China, and is heading towards Vietnam.

I-Hwa Cheng / AFP / Getty Images

As the days get chillier, autumn is a great time to curl up on the sofa with a book. For those willing to venture a little further from home, there’s still time to attend one of the UK’s excellent literary festivals.

Durham Book Festival
One of the country’s oldest literary festivals, Durham Book Festival’s three-day line-up this year includes journalist and debut murder-mystery writer Jeremy Vine, Jonathan Coe, Pat Barker, Natasha Brown and poet Andrew McMillan.

London Literature Festival
This two-week celebration of the written and spoken word at London’s Southbank Centre features big names and rising literary stars. Highlights from the programme include an afternoon with the Poet Laureate Simon Armitage and a conversation with Kamala Harris.

Cliveden Literary Festival, Berkshire
Not much can match up to lively literary debate in a stunning stately house setting. This year’s star-studded line-up includes Salman Rushdie, Marlon James, Tina Brown and Richard E Grant. 

Wigtown Book Festival, Dumfries and Galloway
Wigtown is Scotland’s National Book Town, and its 1,000-strong population swells to more than 13,000 when its book festival opens each year. The landscape is stunning and the event has a cosy hometown feel, with the week beginning with fireworks and a hog roast before a sophisticated programme of literary discussion.

Cheltenham Literature Festival, Gloucestershire
First held in 1949, this annual event from The Times and Sunday Times welcomes more than 500 speakers and 100,000 visitors each year. There are more than 400 events to choose from this time around, including Michael Palin on Venezuela, Hamza Yassin on wildlife and Mick Herron on his Slough House spies.

This is a democratic crisis: we must fix the MP-constituent relationship
Lucy Bush in The House
“The life of an MP today looks nothing like it did half a century ago,” writes the Demos think tank’s Lucy Bush. Back then, they’d get a “dozen or so letters each week”; now they’re handling “up to a thousand calls and emails”, plus social media messages. Yet they’re only hearing from “the angriest, the loudest, or those in crisis”, while the “vast majority remain unheard” and disengaged. We must “bridge this gap”.

A new era of nuclear weapons is here
Peter Frankopan in The Spectator
The world “set a grim record” last year, with “the highest number of state-based armed conflicts in more than seven decades”, writes global history professor Peter Frankopan. And a “new chapter in the bleak history of nuclear weapons proliferation” is beginning. “What was unthinkable a decade ago” is now being “seriously discussed”. With more states contemplating acquiring nuclear weapons, “the space for miscalculation grows ever wider, and the margin for survival ever thinner”.

I know why birth rates are down: an epidemic of selfish men
Rebecca Reid in The i Paper
“Cleverer people than me are to work out out why birth rates are shrinking” in countries worldwide, writes Rebecca Reid. There’s “one factor I haven’t seen any PhD types talking about”. So many men in their 30s and 40s say they’re “definitely” going to have kids – “just absolutely no time in the near future”. But “if you’re not willing to do it until everything feels totally perfect, then frankly you might not be cut out for fatherhood at all”.