Why not house refugees on barges?

‘By the light of the torches, we saw the black Hulk lying out a little way from the mud of the shore, like a wicked Noah’s ark. Cribbed and barred and moored by massive rusty chains, the prison-ship seemed in my young eyes to be ironed like the prisoners. We saw the boat go alongside, and we saw him taken up the side and disappear. Then, the ends of the torches were flung hissing into the water, and went out, as if it were all over with him.’ It is with a pleasurable shudder that most of us will remember Charles Dickens’s description, in Great Expectations, of the wicked Noah’s ark of a prison hulk moored in the Thames. 

It is, I suspect, this cultural memory – of wicked men crammed in filth and squalor aboard the cruel prison ships of the 19^th century – that has made the idea of housing asylum-seekers on barges such a hot-button issue politically.