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The racialisation of asylum inprovincial England: class, placeand whitenessSteve Garnera

a Sociology and Public Policy, Aston University, AstonTriangle, Birmingham, B4 7ET, UKPublished online: 23 Sep 2013.

To cite this article: Steve Garner , Identities (2013): The racialisation of asylum inprovincial England: class, place and whiteness, Identities: Global Studies in Culture andPower, DOI: 10.1080/1070289X.2013.827577

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Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 2013http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1070289X.2013.827577

The racialisation of asylum in provincial England: class, placeand whiteness

Steve Garner

(Received 21August 2012)

This article examines the discursive racialisation of asylum-seekers byresidents of Portishead, a small English town, a process demonstrating aclassed and placed set of expressions of whiteness. I study the racialisation of adiverse group of people from the bottom-up, through an analysis of residents’letters of objection to the Government’s request for planning permissionto turn a building into an asylum processing centre in 2004. Three regis-ters of language are presented: ‘technocratic’, ‘resentful’ and ‘conjectural’.Racialisation is expressed through shared ideas about the type of space inPortishead, and the type of people appropriate for it. The space is constructedas white and middle-class: the asylum-seekers are produced discursively asneither and therefore as not belonging. I suggest that the phenomenon of rela-tively powerful groups constructing themselves as weak and beleaguered canbe conceptualised as a form of ‘defensive engagement’.

Keywords: racialisation; asylum-seekers; British; class; whiteness; place

Introduction

This article examines ‘placed’ and ‘classed’ whiteness analysed through the mobil-isations of ‘reflexive citizens’’racialisation practices towards asylum-seekers.

Whiteness has hitherto primarily been studied in urban and working-classmilieux. The focus here, on a semi-rural space, enables a fuller picture to begleaned of the classed strategies of othering. Moreover, despite the growing litera-ture on media representations of asylum-seekers, and the ways they are constructedby the State, little is written about other agents of racialisation such as citizensand residents. This article is a contribution to that focus, analysing a bottom-updiscourse.

A multi-disciplinary body of literature on racialisation has produced accountsanalysing various processes covered by the term; from the imposition of char-acteristics by a dominant group onto subaltern ones to a group’s ‘reflexive’self-racialisation for strategic political purposes. Here, two of these processes,both engaged in by members of the dominant group, are explored and devel-oped: the collapsing of diverse people into a single imagined identity, e.g. all LatinAmericans in Atlanta being perceived as ‘Mexicans’ (Yarborough 2010), and the

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inscription of ‘race’ onto space (Durrheim and Dixon 2001) by constructing agroup as encroachers into a space where its members do not belong. Moreover,a different permutation is also highlighted, namely the racialisation of a pheno-typically and culturally highly diverse bureaucratic category: asylum-seekers inEngland. The approach consists of analysing the discourse of local residents abouta planning application, rather than examining official texts and speeches.

Racialisation must be understood not exclusively in terms of categorisingaccording to appearance and culture, but also as a more abstract process ofattributing innate characteristics to all members of a given group. In the caseof asylum-seekers in England, it is the group’s social status, rather than sharedphysical characteristics, that serves as the basis for racialisation.

Racialisation requires the interplay of various agencies, e.g. the State (central,regional and local), the media and popular discourse. These symbiotic relation-ships are not analysed in detail here. This article’s objective is to show how aheterogeneous group is racialised by a specific set of actors from the bottom-up,as opposed to the top-down discourse examined by McGhee (2009) vis-à-vis per-manent migrants. This point of entry is the article’s first claim to distinctiveness.The focus on white middle-class provincial Englishness is its second strand oforiginality: the growing literature on white identities frequently omits the middleclasses (Tyler 2012).

The empirical basis for this article is a place-based case study of writtenresponses to a planning application in Portishead (a coastal town around 12 miles(18 km) west of Bristol), in South West England, to change the use of a buildingon a small industrial unit within a residential area to an asylum-seeker processingoffice.

To develop my argument, I first introduce asylum-seeking in England, notingthat this article’s focus is on the discursive construction of them rather than theasylum-seekers’ experiences. Racialisation is then defined, and followed by a briefand selective outline of relevant literature on whiteness in England. The situationin Portishead, in March-April 2004, when the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister(ODPM) made public its plans to change the use of an office on a business park toa processing centre for asylum-seekers, is then presented.

My reading of the discursive production of space, place and ‘race’ emergingfrom the letters of objection to this scheme sent by Portishead residents to NorthSomerset Council’s planning department constitutes the empirical case study. Likethe work of Hubbard (2005), this article analyses letters of opposition to plan-ning permission in a site in rural England. However, I add to Hubbard’s workby suggesting that racialisation is expressed via discursive ‘registers’, whose dis-tinctions enable a fuller understanding of the overlapping elements, and the way‘race’-specific discourse is paradoxically avoided.

Lastly, the Portishead case is analysed and conclusions are drawn about therelationship of class to the racialisation of white identities. I focus on the ‘invertedrelative deprivation’ (Leach et al. 2007) expressed in the letters of opposition,using Ellison’s (1997, 2000) concept of ‘defensive engagement’.

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Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 3

Asylum-seeking in England

Asylum became a key policy item in England in the early twenty-first century.Numbers of official asylum applications peaked at nearly 100,000 in 2002. Thefigure has fallen steadily since, to less than 18,000 in 2010. The Blair administra-tion (1997–2009) responded with policies restricting the conditions under whichapplications could be made, and controlling asylum-seekers’ movement and set-tlement (by planned geographical ‘dispersal’ and detention) (Malloch and Stanley2005, Gill 2009).

In the 2001–2006 period, the British government sought options for process-ing and accommodating asylum-seekers, including both the ‘change of use’ ofold Ministry of Defence buildings and the construction of purpose-built cen-tres in semi-rural locations such as Newton and Throckmorton (Midlands), andLee-on-the-Solent and Bicester (South East England). However, these plans wereabandoned – because of falling numbers of applications, protest campaigns,appeals against planning permission and rising capital costs (Home Office 2007)– everywhere except in Portishead, the only site where asylum-seekers were not tolive, but to report, to collect documentation.

The same period witnessed an increasingly hostile discourse about and repre-sentations of asylum-seekers in England (Buchanan and Grillo 2004, Lea and Lynn2004). They were represented overwhelmingly as a criminal, invading force bring-ing threats of terrorism and excessive male sexuality. This tabloid press coveragegenerated both widespread antipathy towards ‘asylum-seekers’ and the use of theterm to pejoratively designate all kinds of migrants and Black and Minority Ethnic(BME) individuals as threatening and not belonging in England (Lewis 2005). Thebroadsheets developed similar themes of flooding, invasion and subsequent com-petition for resources (Jempson 2007). This provides a significant context for theopposition to the Portishead asylum-processing centre.

The subject of the article is thus not asylum-seekers per se, but their discursiveproduction and racialisation by a dominant group. Literature detailing their expe-riences (Bowes et al. 2009, Bogner et al. 2010) is not directly relevant. I aminterested here in the phenomenon of the privileged producing themselves as dis-advantaged vis-à-vis an objectively under-privileged group or ‘inverted relativedeprivation’. Indeed, power relationships are more revealing about the dominantgroup’s ideas than the subaltern’s. It is no coincidence that asylum-seekers areracialised intensively in the early twenty-first century: they are structurally veryvulnerable (Sales 2002). Although the refugee and asylum system is governedby international agreements, the rules for dealing with asylum-seekers once onnational territory vary from country to country within UNHCR parameters. Dueto bilateral agreements, they may even be processed by officials belonging tonon-EU states (outside the EU’s human rights zone), where they have not evenapplied for asylum, before being given access to EU territory. In England, asylum-seekers are in a parallel legal system: they can be detained without being accusedof a crime; be ordered to live wherever the Home Office decides; and receive at

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most around 70% of the standard benefits. There is no statutory limit on howlong asylum applications take to be dealt with, injecting asylum-seekers’ liveswith structural powerlessness and instability that frequently have psychologicalrepercussions (Bhugra et al. 2010).

Controlling foreign nationals’ access to national territory demonstrates theState’s capacity to defend it. Parameters placed around different statuses thus con-struct categories of migrant through a system of differential rights. The category‘asylum-seeker’ is a bureaucratic creation. Yet in Portishead, the empty categoryis explicitly filled by protesters’ anxieties so that the entire group of diverse peo-ple are produced as sharing characteristics. The absence of fixed phenotypicalreference points makes asylum-seekers’ status all the more significant in their con-struction as homogenous, and dangerous to the ordinary citizens whose writing Istudy here. Indeed, Hubbard (2005, p. 63) notes, in Nottinghamshire in 2003:

while asylum-seekers are drawn from a diversity of ‘white’ and ‘non-white’ ethnicbackgrounds, it was evident those opposing the Newton centre categorized them asan undifferentiated and racialized Other with an invisible history.

This article builds on Hubbard’s work as follows. First, it is noted that the mate-rial background of state policy transforms individuals claiming asylum into astructurally vulnerable bureaucratic category, from which they are relatively pow-erless to challenge representations. Second, I examine the tools which protestorsuse to make racialised distinctions between themselves and the asylum-seekers.To understand this process more effectively, three ‘registers’ of discourse areidentified: ‘technocratic’, ‘resentful’ and ‘conjectural’. Third, while Hubbard useswhite NIMBY-ism as the frame for understanding opposition to the asylum centres,I suggest a form of engaged citizenship specific to this period (defence of percep-tion of losing ground, mobilised differently in different class and geographicalpositionings) and use Ellison’s (1997, 2000) ‘defensive engagement’ as a startingpoint.

Racialisation and whiteness in England

The shift from ‘race relations’ to racialisation in the sociology of racism from theearly 1980s (CCCS 1982, Miles 1984) was driven by the conviction that the objectof study should not be ‘race’ per se, but the processes by which ‘race’ becomesa salient aspect of the actors’ social identities. Critics argued that ‘race relations’reifies ‘race’, assumes that it is necessarily ‘race’ that dominates people’s identi-ties (rather than also class, gender, nationality, etc.), and that it is also incapableof accounting for historical change (Miles 1984, Solomos 1986). So the use ofracialisation necessitates identifying a process.

Racialisation is not based exclusively on colour, but on tying culture indis-sociably to bodies placed in a social hierarchy (Murji and Solomos 2005). Thecultural and the physical are inseparable elements of racist ideas and practices.

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Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 5

Significantly, ostensibly ‘white’ groups can also be racialised by reference to cul-tural rather than phenotypical difference. In the British context, this has historicallyincluded Jews (Kushner 2005), Irish Catholics (Garner 2003), Gypsy-Travellers(Taylor 2008) and Eastern European migrants (Dawney 2008). Conversely, I arguethat a ‘multi-racial’ group (e.g. asylum-seekers) can also be racialised by con-structing it as a bounded entity and conferring upon it a homogenous set ofcharacteristics.

‘Race’ can thus be made, through racialisation, without a stable phenotypi-cally defined object. In the letters written to a council Planning department thatcomprise the primary data here, individual asylum-seekers are rendered invisible:only a collective with shared characteristics emerges. By characterising the othergroup with negative values, the racialising group thus defines itself as the oppositeof these.

This article studies a dominant group discursively racialising a structurallyweaker one in a particular place at a particular moment, using classed and placedmechanisms. It is thus a contribution to the literature examining the process ofracialisation, with an emphasis on the ‘how’ and the ‘who’.

Work on the racialisation of white identities in England has been largely inde-pendent of the theoretical structure provided in the United States (Mills 1997) by‘Critical Race Theory’ and ‘Critical Whiteness Studies’.1 This theoretical liter-ature covers the concept of white privilege (Ferber 1998) and ‘epistemologicalignorance’ (Mills 1997), which posit forms of socialisation making the exis-tence of discrimination towards people of colour, and white people’s agency init invisible to the latter.

Effects of white privilege, mediated through the ‘epistemology of ignorance’,consist of understanding the world as if its racial and social hierarchies are nor-mal and any threat to them is an unfair imposition. This might mean viewing allBME people as prospective and advantaged competitors for dwindling resourcesor seeing asylum-seekers as infiltrating quiet space. Rural settings have been iden-tified as exemplary spaces of Englishness and whiteness, devoid of the impuritiesand messy disorder of urban, multicultural space (Sibley 1995, Neal and Agyeman2006). The study of white identities in England has been dominated by empiricalresearch carried out in exactly those urban multicultural settings (Back 1996) andspecifically in working-class communities (Dench et al. 2006, Beider 2011).

There is a much smaller corpus on middle-class expressions of whiteness andof rural or at least suburban settings, such as Portishead. Tyler’s (2012) ethno-graphies of Leicestershire villages demonstrate the articulation of classed andracialised exclusions (as well as the complexity of individual white people’s jour-neys through learning about their social identities). In ‘Greenville’, the handfulof wealthy Asian families are identified as both self-excluding (their members donot participate in the typical village activities) and potentially disruptive (Tyler2012). The white villagers engage in speculation about the deterioration of theirnorms and standards of living that Asian families might bring about (noise, exces-sive religious fervour, too many people in a small space, etc.). These phantasies of

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disorder demonstrate one function of whiteness: the temporary dissolution of theline between white working- and middle-class subjects.

However, there is another side to the relational work, namely the inter- andintra-class distinctions made by privileged white subjects regarding other whitesubjects, and how these relate to the racialised distinctions they also make. BothByrne (2006) and Reay et al. (2008) discover middle-class white people seeingBME children in schools as useful sources of multicultural capital, whereas whiteworking-class pupils are the ‘Other’ to avoid. Yet this quest is tempered by thesearch for the ‘right mix’ (Byrne 2006), where there are enough BME children toenable capital accumulation, but not enough to tip the school into disadvantagedstatus. Clearly, this equation is informed by simultaneously classed and racialisedassumptions. Moreover, the recurring discursive ‘script’ found in my work onworking-class people in England (Garner 2012) is that references to migrantsand minorities being given entitlements deemed unfair vis-à-vis the local whiteworking-class are frequently followed by references to similarly un-deservingwhite people in the area: particularly those on benefits or engaging in uncivilbehaviour. So the act of discursive racialisation is rarely disconnected from that ofclassing others – even if this means either dis-identifying from working-classnessor claiming ethical higher ground and respectability within a working-class posi-tion. Engagement with racialisation is uneven across social classes. In the caseof the middle-class Portishead letter-writers here, a structurally vulnerable andethnically heterogeneous bureaucratic abstraction (asylum-seeker) is transformeddiscursively into a group with similar pathological characteristics and behaviours(with scarcely any mention of physical appearance) across gender and nationality,i.e. racialised.

Portishead and the asylum processing centre

The study is about a specific place and how it is constructed by its residents asbeing unsuitable for asylum-seekers. Portishead Town Council’s website claimsthat the population is around 22,000, and predicted to climb to 30,000.2 The2001 Census recorded all Portishead wards as having a specific demographic pat-tern: higher proportions of the top three socio-economic categories than the rest ofEngland, i.e. a middle-class habitus.3

The Vale itself is a new-build housing development, 2 km from the towncentre, containing a variety of housetypes built by Persimmon Homes and sell-ing at above the national average prices. In March 2004, the ODPM appliedfor ‘change of use’ for one building on Portishead Business Park, in the north-west corner of The Vale, for use as an office for processing asylum-seekers.North Somerset County Council received around 200 written objections toplanning permission in the months of March and April 2004.4 The planningpermission was refused, by Chair’s casting vote, in 2004, but the ODPM suc-cessfully appealed. The office actually opened in November 2005 (PortisheadTimes 2005).

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Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 7

Methods

In England, responses to planning applications are placed in the public domain, viathe internet, by the relevant local authority. I performed a manifest content analy-sis of the 200 letters posted to the planning section of North Somerset Council’swebsite in March-April 2004. The letters were read for arguments put forward,then classified under researcher-generated codes (Creswell 2003). An initial list ofthese themes was split and spliced over two more readings, after which they wereregrouped under major headings. Noting the arguments raised in each letter, over1000 points were counted (see Table 1). A final reading, for detail about place, andthe associations made between themes was then carried up.

Table 1. Types of objection to change of use..

Objection No. of mentions

Poor transport and access 141 (14%)Insufficient parking 103 (10%)Inappropriate for residential/suburban

area/‘village’83 (8.2%)

Elsewhere would be a better location 76 (7.5%)No facilities/amenities for people waiting 58 (5.7%)Bad for Portishead (as well as The Vale estate) 54 (5.3%)Out of hours use of building 54 (5.3%)Encroachment on residents’ privacy 53 (5.2%)Physical danger 52 (25 general; 25 specifically

mention children; 2 specificallymention women) (5.1%)

∗Noise and disturbance 49 (4.8%)No guarantee on numbers of asylum-seekers

coming to facility37 (3.6%)

House prices will fall 34 (3.3%)Opposition to change of category of unit (B1 to

B8)30 (2.9%)

∗Light pollution27

∗Increased traffic and pollution 26Difficult for asylum-seekers to find way 20Who is paying for the facility?/Not value for

money20

Application registration card scheme too 18More work for police/increased crime 18Deterrent for businesses to relocate to Portishead,

and for potential homebuyers17

Residents not fully informed 16Thin end of the wedge 10Stressful for asylum-seekers 8No new jobs created 6Politics 2Asylum-seekers will resort to begging 2Total 1014∗Forms of pollution 102 (10%)

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Table 1 thus represents the frequency of the themes raised, but this is obviouslyopen to debate. Certainly, items 3–6 inclusive in the list (over 26% of thearguments) overlap. I have attempted to remain faithful to the emphasis of theoriginal letters. A latent content analysis would note the proliferation of concernsover different kinds of pollution (dirt, noise, light, traffic) and suggest that thepresence of the asylum-seekers could also be read as ‘pollution’ because they areinterpreted in this corpus as dangerous, unethical bodies defiling the presumedpurity of that space.

The sample group, resident in and around The Vale (according to addressesgiven), is characterised as middle-class due to the price of housing there, theproportion of top socio-economic categories in Portishead (see above) and theirengagement in letterwriting as a meaningful form of protest. This sample isnot numerically representative. However, given the extensive contemporaneousresearch about attitudes towards immigration carried out (Clarke and Garner 2010)in settings similar to The Vale, I am convinced that the core sentiments arerepresentative.

Discursive registers

My reading of these letters suggests that objections are expressed in threediscursive ‘registers’: technocratic, resentful and conjectural.

In the ‘technocratic’ register, objections are articulated purely around planningregulations, an engagement with external, official categorisation of space by usage,maps, etc. Concerns in this register centre on the principle of ‘change of use’,poor access and transport links to Portishead, insufficient parking and the lackof amenities available for the asylum-seekers once they reach The Vale. Anxietyemerges over the overall impacts on both The Vale and, more broadly, Portishead.Suggestions are made for more appropriate places to house the facility: usuallyBristol, but occasionally other regional urban centres.

Second, there is the more emotionally charged ‘resentful’ register, focusingon the impacts that changes resulting from the new use of space are understoodto entail. These include the general deterioration of living conditions, a fall inproperty values and loss of trust in officialdom. This latter concern is focused bothnationally, on the Home Office’s handling of the immigration issue in general andlocally, on North Somerset County Council’s alleged long-term failure to providesufficient infrastructure for Portishead. This failure is noted as poor ‘value formoney’ in terms of local taxation.

Third, there is a ‘conjectural’ register, in which the putative behaviour of theasylum-seekers is speculated upon. This behaviour is expected to be detrimentalto the locals, and entails a variety of threats to Portishead’s way of life due tooutsiders’ presence in public space, including increased crime and physical danger,especially to children.

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Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 9

Imagining Portishead ‘village’

The racialisation of the asylum-seekers derives from the meanings of placeattributed to Portishead by its residents. Neal and Agyeman (2006) argue that thecountryside represents a racialised and classed space of representation in whichEnglishness is constructed. Village life, rurality and the countryside as exem-plary ‘national’ space have long been contrasted with dirty and disordering urbanlife (Williams 1973). Neal and Agyeman stress that while more ethnic minoritiesare now present in rural space, the ideological stranglehold of whiteness on it isstill intact. A desire to situate oneself in a small-scale, rural environment is oneresponse to the development of multicultural nationhood and urban space. In theletters of objection, the main assumption underlying the arguments is that bothPortishead and The Vale estate are residential, semi-rural, ‘village’ locations (andtherefore unsuitable for asylum-seekers).

As elsewhere in provincial England (Modell 2004, Hubbard 2005), the use ofbuildings to process asylum-seekers is therefore viewed as a priori inappropriatefor a space such as The Vale. Objectors emphasise the mismatch between the typeof space that Portishead (and The Vale) represent for them, and those people andactivities that will be present if the industrial unit becomes an asylum processingoffice.

‘. . . we are a small community in the outskirts of Portishead’ writes O41. ‘Themajority of residents are family orientated who purchased new properties withinthe last 5 years on this new “village type” development’.

The size and tranquillity of Portishead are frequently mentioned together, oftenwith problems related to development. Its appropriateness as a living space forparticular types of community is emphasised. ‘I am 84 years of age’, beginsO135, ‘and did not purchase a property in what I thought was a peaceful, safeand pleasant environment where I can take a slow stroll round the open spacesand the play area with my dog to watch the little children play and have a quickchat with the young mums only to have this jeopardised by such an outrageousapplication’.

O8 states that: ‘We have lived on the Vale for one year and have found it to bean area where people take pride in their properties, children are safe and propertyprices remain at a level that discourages undesirable residents from moving intoour community’ (my emphasis).

A neat conflation of social and economic values thus concludes this initialsummary of spatial identity. The Vale is a residential space apart: a village onthe ‘outskirts’ of a non-urban space, where safety and quiet are cherished val-ues; people have paid extra for them. Having sketched the consensus about whatPortishead represents, I shall turn to examples of the objectors’ three discursiveregisters defined earlier that are drawn from the letters of objection that form myprimary data.

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The ‘technocratic’ register

Here, the objectors’ arguments focus on the perceived incongruity between exist-ing (safe and quiet) use of space and the consequences of placing the processingcentre on The Vale.

Planning permission for the existing offices (Portishead Business Park) arguesO17, ‘was only agreed on the understanding that they would be precious officesblending in with the residential area . . . ’

The screening centre, by extension, does not blend in. Like many, O6 has clearideas about this: ‘When the advertising board for the Vale Development was firsterected, it boasted this would be a “village development”, well you tell me wherethere is a “village” with a business park and an Asylum Assessment Centre?’

O30 adds: ‘To enforce an Asylum Screening Unit on an already over-industrialised part of a private residential area cannot, surely, be in the interestof all those living in Portishead’.

Indeed, the proposed facility will de facto transform the ‘village’ space into anurban one. Why this is against Portishead’s interest is expanded upon by O39, whoidentifies cause and effect:

It [the processing centre] belongs in a more industrial/business area such as centralBristol, where it will be rewarded with an invisibility and indifference that it cannever achieve in a small town like Portishead. Asylum-seekers in Portishead will behighly visible, and therefore a constant reminder and aggression for all those whooppose the notification.

Bound up in these statements about collective interest lie concerns about infras-tructure, especially transport, which both predate and have outlasted the asylumcentre affair.5 Note also the assumption that the asylum-seekers will be visi-bly distinct and generate ‘aggression’: the three registers clearly often overlap inpractice.

Complaints about infrastructure take the form of long lists of the town’s defi-ciencies, but O131’s conclusion is succinct: ‘The inadequacy of this site beggarsbelief regarding parking, transport to & from Bristol + the volume of peopledescending on a quiet village with no amenities to cope’.

This statement compresses an expression of the connection between place andfacilities, with Portishead again characterised as a ‘quiet village’ devoid of thetype of amenities (and people) associated with the metropolitan centre (Bristol),which, in the Portishead residents’ narratives, becomes an important presence: anurban ‘Other’, where the rules differ from those of the ‘village’.

The activities permissible within village space code it as pure: white, middle-class, quiet, full of children, with no businesses. Accordingly, asylum-seekersbelong in urban space, because, as O173 concludes ‘we all want to come homeaway from the hustle and bustle of a city, not back to it’. Asserting the tranquillityof space is also a way to underscore the characteristics of the tranquil ‘we’ thatinhabits it.

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Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 11

The second frame articulates frustration with local and national authorities andI shall now turn to that.

The ‘resentful’ register

The link between the technocratic and resentful registers is expressed in O20’stypical comment:

Bristol is the travel and civic centre for miles around in the SW side of England, andno doubt plenty of these illegal immigrants are already living there, so that’s wherethey should be interviewed, not a further 15 miles away in a small dormitory-suburbtown with very poor public transport links.

Moreover, deploying a recurrent logic in these letters, O88 continues:

We pay premium council tax to live in one of the so-say most exclusive up andcoming towns in England. This proposed move would detract from its exclusivity anddevalue our property price. Can we therefore expect a deduction in our council tax?

The local authority and central government become the sites for the protestors’claims for compensation, while the high council tax becomes a classed element ofcontention:‘What will happen when the number of burglaries and car thefts go upand the police are called out?’, asks O168: ‘ . . . the honest decent members of thistown will see an increase in their council tax bills due to extra policing’.

A stark sense of betrayal emerges from this register. Authorities and PropertyDevelopers are viewed has having failed to protect the space of The Vale from theencroachment of ‘undesirable residents’, as O8 had noted.

Expression of the entitlement to space and quiet vary from the almost corpo-rate: ‘I strongly believe that Portishead’s progress to fulfil its aspirations of beingan affluent flagship town for the South West will be seriously damaged by thisproposed development’ (O202), to the indignantly blunt: ‘It is unacceptable to“dump” such a place in the middle of a residential area, literally feet away frompeople’s front doors in some cases’ (O52).

Such unauthorised dumping may have serious ramifications:

Having moved to Portishead 18 months ago to invest in my families right to a betterquality of life I find all the past years of hard work, saving and moving to what Ithought was an up and coming area, all to be taken away. The decision to be made bycouncillors, most of whom probably do not live in the affected area. How would youtruly feel if it was next to your home? Something you’ve worked for all your life tobe wiped out from underneath you. (O30)

This talk of tax and mismanagement is the catalyst for the rising emotional toneclimaxing in expressions of betrayal. The understandings of space outlined aboveinflect this crucial interface of relations between citizen and State (both local and

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national): the citizens must be able to trust the State, which itself should be anexpression of the citizens’ will. O128 extends the distrust to national authorities:

Recent media coverage of Home Office efficiency – or rather the lack of it! – con-cerning immigration in general ( . . . ) leads me to disbelieve anything they mightsay.

O61 is particularly unimpressed, as the planning decision ‘undermines any publictrust in this government statements on asylum-seekers’, and constitutes ‘anotherperfidious act by HMG’. The discourse on rights and trust is summed up by O204,who writes: ‘such a change of use would be contrary to the rights of the residence[sic] of the Vale to peaceful enjoyment of their properties’.

These accusations can be read as a reaction to the experience of victimhood onthe part of people unused to feeling powerless. In this ‘resentful register’, authori-ties rather than asylum-seekers are the culprits, but resentment is generated by theextent of negative changes occasioned by the latter’s presence. It is to these, as yetabsent, actors that I now turn.

The ‘conjectural’ register

This register articulates concerns over what might happen if asylum-seekers cometo The Vale. It should be stressed that no asylum-seeker had set foot on the estatewhen these letters were written. None of what follows is thus based on first-handexperience, hence the term ‘conjectural’. The final strand of objections centreson the threats that the presence of asylum-seekers would bring. These consist ofvarious forms of criminal and anti-social behaviour.

The assumption underpinning the ‘conjectural’ register is that asylum-seekersengage in anti-social activities: ‘As the people coming here have not beenscreened’, writes O9, ‘we trust that they will arrive and return under police escortand be confined to the building whilst in Portishead’. Few go as far as O66, whosends marker-pen-appended tabloid newspaper cuttings linking asylum-seekers toterrorist actions and immigration infractions. However, the theme of abscondingasylum-seekers (enabled by the M5 motorway rather than Portishead’s poor publictransport links) is frequently broached.

O200 is more expansive about probable outcomes, referring to the asylum-seekers as ‘strangers, who have entered our country illegally, and expect us to payfor them to stay here . . . but how are we, as an already overstretched communitygoing to cope with large volumes of homeless desperate people hanging aroundprivate residential areas in the village and why should we have to?’

Anxieties about potential crime extend to the vulnerability of The Vale’s chil-dren. A concerned mother writes: ‘I have two teenage children who confidentlywalk around the area going about their business. I would hate to think that theycould become intimidated by groups of Asylum-seekers loitering around “this saferesidential area” (O56).

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O107 is more direct still: ‘I don’t think you can [guarantee the safety of ourchildren] with the sort of people you are planning to dump on our doorstep’.The precise threat mounted is sometimes unclear from the letters, although theprojected behaviour of the asylum-seekers ranges across a set of anti-socialbehaviours, such as urinating in bushes (O111), camping (O57), ‘sleeping on thestreets and in sheds and gardens of local people’ (O38), ‘ . . . pilfering, arguments,fights, caused by people who have too much time on their hands, and get into mis-chief’ (O130). One objector, who claims that she cannot be racist because she isof Asian descent (O88), predicts that ‘at best we can expect begging on our streetsand the possibility of theft from our properties’.

The vulnerability of women is also raised, by O197, who admits to being‘scared to walk around here at night on my own, even in the daytime. It will impacteveryone’s lives so much and destroy the community’.

Seeing the technocratic, resentful and conjectural registers independentlyallows us to understand that racialising discourse is not monolithic, and containselements that ostensibly have little to do with ‘race’. However, thinking of themas overlapping strands of a single, broader discourse enables us to demonstrate amovement from delineating space as suitable for particular people and activities(by ‘race’ and class), to identifying unsuitable people and detailing the activitiesbound to fill it. So, how can I interpret the logics expressed through these threeregisters?

Discussion: a community of the ordinary white middle-class?

A specific compounding of spatial and classed constructions structures theracialisation of the asylum-seekers. Within the South West, a racially weightedspatial polarity: multicultural (un-ordinary) Bristol vs. its (ordinary) white hin-terland is established. The overwhelming whiteness of Portishead (compared tothe more multicultural space of Bristol, which would in this logic be a moreappropriate place for the processing centre) enables the development of a soli-darity of interest –against encroachment – based on values and their projectedopposites. For the objectors, tranquillity and investment are threatened by theasylum-seekers’ desperation, incipient violence, and criminality and the knock-on effects for community. Ahmed (2001) argues that emotional and ideologicallabour is invested in telling stories about one’s community that depicts the ‘we’as virtuous and good, in other words as a ‘community of the ordinary’. In theletters analysed here, asylum-seekers embody un-ordinariness vis-à-vis the ordi-nary Vale residents. Whereas the former are constructed as potential criminals, thecommunity of residents produced by the objectors is composed of law-abiding,quiet, unthreatening and reasonable people responding to the unfair imposition ofa detrimental facility. A neat conflation of these assumptions into a general rule isvoiced by O57: ‘There is a potential for increased crime which often arises whenyou have a stark contrast between those seeking asylum and those who have paidtheir taxes and have worked hard to build up a life and home for themselves’.

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Portishead – and especially The Vale – is discursively produced as respectable,clean, quiet and safe; in other words unpolluted and unspoiled by dirty, noisy,dangerous, disgusting and unproductive Others, some of whom are white work-ingclass (Reay et al. 2008, Watt 2009). Note the 10% of objections mentioningforms of pollution (marked with an asterisk in Table 1) that the office would bring,such as traffic, noise, air, light, as well as implicitly that generated by dirty peo-ple. Yet first-hand knowledge upon which such assumptions could reasonably bepredicated is entirely absent. The (place, ‘race’ and class-based) Vale communityexerts its identity on a group knowable solely through media.

The class basis of this ordinary community is revealed not only in Portishead’ssocio-economic balance, but also in its forms of protest and threatened resistance.First, letters of objection, particularly in their evocation of planning regulations,show a belief that they expect, and are entitled to be, listened to. Second, the caseagainst the processing centre’s emotional poignancy stems from the betrayal oftrust in the civic pact between governing and governed that working-class actorsare less likely to see a priori as a level playing field. Third, the chosen form ofthreatened action is frequently that of withholding council tax. O137 for example,is unequivocal:

The reason I will refuse [to pay council tax] is because I will need that sum of£141.00 a month to help pay for damage which I believe will be caused to myproperty when these foreigners start maundering around The Vale.

O67 is planning for protest on a larger stage: ‘ . . . also who do we get compen-sation from when we cannot sell our houses and lose money on our propertiesthat we have worked for? Maybe we should be going to the European Courtof Human Rights’. Indeed, white middle-class self-representations as power-less people whose rights are unprotected are particularly strong in Portishead,Lee-on-the-Solent (Modell 2004) and the Sussex coast (Grillo 2005).

Based on this study of classed and placed whiteness, how can I understandthis self-presentation by a relatively powerful group as powerless victims? Leachet al. (2007, p. 196), describing the Australian context, call this phenomenon‘inverted relative deprivation’. In relation to asylum in England, this deprivationseems to have spurred the development of fleeting social movements. Ellison iden-tifies three factors generating a reflexive citizenship of ‘defensive engagement’(1997, p. 711): the erosion of patterns of belonging, the readjustment of existingnotions of rights and the institutional foci of redress. All these factors are present inPortishead. Ellison (2000) theorises that in this form of citizenship, there is either‘pro-active’ or ‘defensive’ engagement. The anti-asylum groups fulfil the ‘defen-sive engagement’ criteria, being organised around existing social divisions, namelythe articulation of classed and racialised identities which assume their perfectexpression in the claims of entitlement to a specific quiet, safe, small space hous-ing a tranquil and exclusive community. However in Ellison’s (1997) argument,the ‘defensive engagement’ expressed in ‘fundamentalist solidarity’ stems from

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a lack of capital and resources. While the temporary solidarity generated aroundmiddle-classness and whiteness here, in semi-rural England, could be described asfundamentalist; the actors do enjoy plenty of capital and resources, yet perceivethem as fragile and thus easily degraded. I might also present these campaigns asembodiments of white privilege and ‘epistemological ignorance’ (Mills 1997): theasylum-seekers’ structural weakness and powerlessness is not ‘seen’.

Conclusions: class, place and racialisation

Ultimately, the actors in the Portishead case study are subject to separate regimesof legality and enjoy vastly differential access to all kinds of resources. The globalpower relations that produce the bureaucratic category ‘asylum-seeker’ and enactforms of physical and psychological violence on its members are rooted in thematerial. Only asylum-seekers are currently so denuded of agency that they can bemoved around by the State, kept in a parallel welfare system and detained withoutcharges (Gill 2009). This vast power discrepancy therefore renders them very eas-ily racialisable, regardless of their national, ethnic and phenotypical diversity. Theperfect storm comprised of states attempting to demonstrate their control of bor-ders, media searching for scapegoats and dissatisfied citizens looking to valorisetheir own identities in conditions viewed as declining, has made asylum-seekers, atthis historical moment, the optimum racialis-able and oppress-ible category. ThePortishead case demonstrates a struggle over who controls access to space andrepresentations of it.

So, how does racialisable function here? With the potential encroachment ofasylum-seekers onto their space looming, objectors envisage themselves facingan economic, sexual and civic abyss threatening to engulf their assets, a cleanand pure environment expunged of the dangerous classes, children and owner-occupancy as a pension plan. Like Watt’s (2009) Outer London ex-Eastenders,these residents are pursued into the tabula rasa space of the new-build suburbanhousing development by the noises, sights and chaos-inducing anxieties they wereoriginally seeking to escape.

The racialisation of the asylum-seekers revolves around a dystopian set ofspeculations about what incongruous spatial practices will be generated. Thetechnocratic register covers the discussion of the change of building use’s plan-ning merits. The resentment register derives from the betrayal of trust in centralgovernment, planners and developers. Finally, the conjectural register fills thehypothetical space where asylum-seekers are not yet present with the negativeconsequences of their encroachment into The Vale. Indeed, in this imagined geog-raphy, the asylum-seekers collapse areas demarcated for different activities (quietliving, business, transport, play, leisure) into border-less disorder: a re-enactmentof their collapsing of national boundaries.

This article identifies the discursive ideological labour that simultaneouslyracialises its objects (asylum-seekers) and subjects (white middle-class letterwriters objecting to planning permission) through explicit reference to place.

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In their letters of objection, residents racialise asylum-seekers by conferringcharacteristics on them en masse, transforming a heterogeneous group into ahomogenous one. This is often accomplished by citing The Vale/Portishead asparticular types of place appropriate for one group of people’s presence, but inap-propriate for others’. It is also virtually devoid of explicit attachment of visual‘racial’ markers to the asylum-seekers.

The letters express a discourse of anxiety and frustration about many elementsof contemporary life in England, one aspect of which is the association of asy-lum with threat, danger and degradation. Drawing heavily on media frames, theobjectors discursively racialise the asylum-seekers. In doing so, they express their(middle) classed experiences and outlook; an entitlement to space unspoiled.

Using abstract, formal political engagement frames that pertain to a rela-tionship between citizen and State, Portishead residents enact their identities byunderscoring their status as rights-bearing individuals vis-à-vis the rights-denudedasylum-seekers. Paradoxically, the objectors’ argument states that this situationis reversed. White privilege is usually revealed to its beneficiaries only whenits normality appears to be challenged, as is the case here for The Vale’s resi-dents. Moreover, for these objectors, the anonymous, self-interested State playsan authoritarian role: imposing its will and frame of understanding on the citi-zens. This is revealed in the self-definition of The Vale estate residents as ordinary,deserving and beleaguered individuals, unfairly imposed upon: a striking inversionof power relations, in which a dominant group sees itself as disempowered.

One staple finding of studies of white working-class identity in England(Beider 2011) is that people feel multiply disadvantaged vis-à-vis ethnic minori-ties. While the specifics of this perceived unfairness differ, the pattern of perceiv-ing it is shared and cross-class in nature (Clarke and Garner 2010). Expressionsof beleaguered-ness are clearly not exclusive to the white working-class: they arealso articulated in middle-class provincial England. The distinction is that for thelatter, the nationally-expressed hostility to asylum-seekers gave rise to short-livedlocal campaigning groups.

The final irony is that the disturbances that did ensue, in 2009, were the resultof anti-deportation campaigners, No Borders Network, targeting the building andcar park (This is Somerset 2009).6 Asylum-seekers themselves remained absentactors, as they were in the 2004 controversy.

AcknowledgementsThe author would like to thank the referees and editorial team of Identities for their closereading of previous drafts and suggestions for improving the text.

Notes1. Although the work of Gillborn (2005), for example, provides a counter example.2. At the 2001 Census, the town’s 7 wards totalled 14,759 inhabitants. For details and

pictures, see http://www.portisheadtownguide.co.uk/

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3. 46.6% in top three, cf. 40% nationally; and only 23% in bottom three, cf. 28.2%nationally (Neighbourhood Statistics).

4. 211 letters are scanned into pdf documents on the online publicly accessible archive:6 of these were incomplete and 6 more were copies. The total was 199 separate objec-tions. There is no limit to how many arguments can be expressed in one letter. Theseranged from handwritten half-page A4 to 11-page single spaced typed documents.Objectors’ names are not used; they are given the letter ‘O’ for objector and a number.Additionally, the extracts are presented as written, without altered spelling or grammar.

5. Although for a more scathing opinion on this argument, see Aaronovitch (2004).In 2006, there was a series of demonstrations about traffic modification in the town.One leading campaigner was elected as a Conservative councillor in the 2006 localelections.

6. The ‘Bristol No Borders’ group target the Portishead building because it is a base forthe dawn raid squads that go to the residences of asylum-seekers to detain them.

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STEVE GARNER is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Languages and Social Sciencesat Aston University.ADDRESS: Sociology and Public Policy, Aston University, Aston Triangle, Birmingham,B4 7ET, UK.Email: s.j.garner@aston.ac.uk

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