Robert Mitchell

Proud to have represented residents locally on Parish, District or County Councils 1999-2021. Comments are my own views or those of organisations I follow.

[Robert Mitchell @CllrRob]

However hard working, I’d suggest a calm delay is better than a horse/pony coming through any windscreen!

[𝐹𝒾𝓍𝒾𝑒 𝒞𝓎𝒸𝓁𝒾𝓈𝓉 @ViaTowerBridge]

@MerPolTraffic @BritishHorse Nice work but did you know you were delaying all those hard-working tax-paying drivists?

[Robert Mitchell @CllrRob]

@WiltsSpecOps Keep up the good work, always reassuring when you post , even if we’re the other end of the country👌

[Wilts Specialist Ops @WiltsSpecOps]

#RPU working with #ARV and Trowbridge CPT stopped this vehicle after the 4 males on board had just committed a High Value Shoplifting in Warminster. Vehicle located & stopped in Melksham, all goods recovered and 4 off to custody #Arrested

[Robert Mitchell @CllrRob]

@CraigBirtwistl2 @gmptraffic I’ve seen one going up the hard shoulder of M11, at dusk, with no options to get off safely for a few miles in either direction- madness, dialled999 to report position

[Robert Mitchell @CllrRob]

@DebbieWhaley19 @StaffsRCT @Policingstoke They’re normally sitting on them👎

[Robert Mitchell @CllrRob]

@MerPolTraffic Job done, luckily no-one hurt, one hopes, except for drivers’ pride & bank balance & points etc idc!

[Graham Butland 🇺🇦 @cllrgbutland]

Wonderful evening ⁦@SaffronHallSW⁩ with the BBC Concert Orchestra and Katie Dereham. The concert will be Friday Night is Music night on BBC Radio 3 on 17th May. Another plus for the county of Essex.

[#NaMo Again 🚩 @BhaktSanatani_]

@fasc1nate A beautiful ocean and a more beautiful sunset 🌅

[Robert Mitchell @CllrRob]

Very well deserved though sadly many may not appreciate the benefits of such a steady hand on the tiller over the last 20 yrs. Proud & honoured to have been able to learn many of the delicate political skills, as part of his team for many of those years.

[Graham Butland 🇺🇦 @cllrgbutland]

Surprised and honoured to have been presented with this ⁦@BraintreeDC⁩ AGM this evening.

[Robert Mitchell @CllrRob]

@MStephens1977 @CMPG The elevated position of driving an HGV, especially in slow traffic or a left handed truck,means one sees more idiots on phones getting distracted, without even looking for them- I just don’t have the 👮‍♂️🚔🚁 passengers & connected resources I had for 20+ years! @NPASSouthEast

[Robert Mitchell @CllrRob]

@Vanguard_WW2 Real heroes, and there were many others - we remain in their debt…we will remember them.

[Vanguard WWII by Cadet - bringing history to life! @Vanguard_WW2]

On 18 January 1945, all four "Merlinettes" are kept back as the other women in their hut are sent out to work. They will never be seen again. According to a laundy worker who saw their recovered clothing, there were no traces of blood, indicating that Eugénie, Marie-Louise, Pierrette and Suzanne had been hanged and then taken to the camp's crematorium. 4/4

[CALL TO ACTIVISM @CalltoActivism]

A British writer penned the best description of Donald Trump I’ve ever read:

“Why do some British people not like Donald Trump?”

A few things spring to mind. Trump lacks certain qualities which the British traditionally esteem. For instance, he has no class, no charm, no coolness, no credibility, no compassion, no wit, no warmth, no wisdom, no subtlety, no sensitivity, no self-awareness, no humility, no honour and no grace – all qualities, funnily enough, with which his predecessor Mr. Obama was generously blessed. So for us, the stark contrast does rather throw Trump’s limitations into embarrassingly sharp relief.

Plus, we like a laugh. And while Trump may be laughable, he has never once said anything wry, witty or even faintly amusing – not once, ever. I don’t say that rhetorically, I mean it quite literally: not once, not ever. And that fact is particularly disturbing to the British sensibility – for us, to lack humour is almost inhuman. But with Trump, it’s a fact. He doesn’t even seem to understand what a joke is – his idea of a joke is a crass comment, an illiterate insult, a casual act of cruelty.

Trump is a troll. And like all trolls, he is never funny and he never laughs; he only crows or jeers. And scarily, he doesn’t just talk in crude, witless insults – he actually thinks in them. His mind is a simple bot-like algorithm of petty prejudices and knee-jerk nastiness.

There is never any under-layer of irony, complexity, nuance or depth. It’s all surface. Some Americans might see this as refreshingly upfront. Well, we don’t. We see it as having no inner world, no soul. And in Britain we traditionally side with David, not Goliath. All our heroes are plucky underdogs: Robin Hood, Dick Whittington, Oliver Twist. Trump is neither plucky, nor an underdog. He is the exact opposite of that. He’s not even a spoiled rich-boy, or a greedy fat-cat. He’s more a fat white slug. A Jabba the Hutt of privilege.

And worse, he is that most unforgivable of all things to the British: a bully. That is, except when he is among bullies; then he suddenly transforms into a snivelling sidekick instead. There are unspoken rules to this stuff – the Queensberry rules of basic decency – and he breaks them all. He punches downwards – which a gentleman should, would, could never do – and every blow he aims is below the belt. He particularly likes to kick the vulnerable or voiceless – and he kicks them when they are down.

So the fact that a significant minority – perhaps a third – of Americans look at what he does, listen to what he says, and then think ‘Yeah, he seems like my kind of guy’ is a matter of some confusion and no little distress to British people, given that:

• Americans are supposed to be nicer than us, and mostly are.

• You don’t need a particularly keen eye for detail to spot a few flaws in the man.

This last point is what especially confuses and dismays British people, and many other people too; his faults seem pretty bloody hard to miss. After all, it’s impossible to read a single tweet, or hear him speak a sentence or two, without staring deep into the abyss. He turns being artless into an art form; he is a Picasso of pettiness; a Shakespeare of shit. His faults are fractal: even his flaws have flaws, and so on ad infinitum.

God knows there have always been stupid people in the world, and plenty of nasty people too. But rarely has stupidity been so nasty, or nastiness so stupid. He makes Nixon look trustworthy and George W look smart. In fact, if Frankenstein decided to make a monster assembled entirely from human flaws – he would make a Trump.

And a remorseful Doctor Frankenstein would clutch out big clumpfuls of hair and scream in anguish: ‘My God… what… have… I… created?' If being a twat was a TV show, Trump would be the boxed set.”

-Nate White

[Robert Mitchell @CllrRob]

@fasc1nate Just as written/sung by Mark Knopfler in Dire Straits -Telegraph Road, lyrics I regularly quoted in planning meetings as a @BraintreeDC member 2003-2019 - the new station east of Chelmsford is an ironic twist in the normal development order!!

[Chris Moss @MossChrisP]

@CMPG @StaffsPolice @cmpgsgt Another good result and another dangerous driver off our roads. Especially annoying for all those who pay their insurance and obey the rules. Well done team.

[Brick Cop©️ @Brick_Cop]

Lots of comments today about ‘Police not doing enough about this, Police not doing enough about that…’ 👀

So let’s look at the reality of a typical borough’s resources to deal with well, everything…🚔

0700 - on any given day the Emergency Response team will parade. Their responsibility is to attend all calls graded ‘I’ for Immediate Response. The charter time for that response is 15 minutes although it’s often a lot faster. They are also responsible for calls where an hour response is deemed appropriate. Now most teams will parade the following resources: 🚨

1 x Response Van
3 x Response Cars
4 x Non Response Cars
1 x Appointment Car

(Based on an average of 18 Cops being in for a shift, after AID, training and annual leave has been considered.)

On parade those vehicles will be given abstractions or taskings. Abstractions are where we will lose that vehicle for probably the whole shift. For example a crime scene / a hospital guard or a constant watch. Crime scenes have to be protected until CID are happy they’ve got all the forensics and it can be closed, a hospital guard can be for two reasons:

1) A person under arrest needs hospital treatment.
2) A victim of a serious injury needs to be kept an eye on for their safety whilst in hospital, or we need to be aware of their condition deteriorating.

A constant watch, is someone in custody threatening or attempting to self harm in a cell, or has a serious medical condition where they must be monitored - constantly. Now yes we do employ staff in Custody to look after detainees, but under the current policy they aren’t allowed to deal with violent individuals, hence Cops have to be used in those circumstances… 😅

So say at 0700 we have one of each, we have now lost three non response vehicles. 🤷🏼‍♂️

That means we now have the response van and cars, one non response car and the appointment car. 🚙

The appointment car has appointments for people who’ve waited to report a non urgent crime and those appointments can’t be moved or cancelled unless there is a very good reason to do so, and the other vehicles will take outstanding calls or be tasked to specific outstanding calls. ✅

Now if someone is arrested we lose say one of the response cars and the van to custody so we’re down to two response cars and the non response car.

Why not the non response car taking the arrest?

Most likely the response car got there first because it can use blues and twos to get there. 🚔

Then we have a road traffic collision requiring two vehicles to close the road.

Now we’re down to just the one response car left. They will try and take outstanding calls but get diverted to a new emergency so now we’re out of units. 😳

We then hand all of this over to Late Turn who’ll find themselves in a similar situation.

This happens all day everyday across London, because it’s the nature of emergency response. 😕

So it’s not that we don’t want to deploy to non emergencies like burglaries which have already taken place, it’s that at many points we run out of units to deploy to anything, including emergencies themselves.

On one shift last year I handed over 4 outstanding immediate response calls from lates to nights because we simply didn’t have anyone to go to them.

So you can criticise the Cops working their socks off every day, or accept that sadly and constantly demand outstrips the ability to respond. Meaning we burn Cops out and quite rightly they have to take a break. 🫠

#ThinBlueLine 🚨

[Robert Mitchell @CllrRob]

Nice one!

[Irish Ranger (Sevvy) @VeteranIrish]

The easiest way to explaining the UK Military to civvies.......

The Royal Navy is the oldest, Mum and Dad made all their parenting mistakes with him.

The Army is the middle son, they are the explorers who left home and no one cared.

The Royal Marines are the youngest and Mum and Dad let them do whatever they want. They have an inferiority complex due to their small size.

Well, Mum and Dad got a divorce once all the boys had grown up. Mum got remarried to a rich bloke and quickly gave birth to a fourth son, the Royal Air Force.
She loves him the most, showers him with the best toys and buys him whatever he wants. When they go on holiday, they fly first class, stay in five star hotels and enjoy the finest meals. The RAF is spoiled rotten and his three older brothers bitterly resent him for this.

Finally there is the RAF Regiment. The RAF Regiment is the rich stepfathers illegitimate son from a fling with a filthy prostitute during the seven year itch. None of the other brothers think or act like he's part of the family and treat him like the unwanted ginger bastard stepchild that nobody wants.
This is the easiest way to explain the difference between the UK Armed Forces and their internal dynamics to civilians......
😉👍🏻😁😁

[CALL TO ACTIVISM @CalltoActivism]

Wow.

Here’s Robert De Niro’s full statement about how Donald Trump should NEVER be president again:

“I’ve spent a lot of time studying bad men.  I’ve examined their characteristics, their mannerisms, the utter banality of their cruelty.

Yet there’s something different about Donald Trump. When I look at him, I don’t see a bad man. Truly.

I see an evil one.

Over the years, I’ve met gangsters here and there. This guy tries to be one, but he can’t quite pull it off. There’s such a thing as “honor among thieves.” Yes, even criminals usually have a sense of right and wrong. 

Whether they do the right thing or not is a different story — but — they have a moral code, however warped.

Donald Trump does not. He’s a wannabe tough guy with no morals or ethics. No sense of right or wrong. No regard for anyone but himself — not the people he was supposed to lead and protect, not the people he does business with, not the people who follow him, blindly and loyally, not even the people who consider themselves his “friends.” He has contempt for all of them.

We New Yorkers got to know him over the years that he poisoned the atmosphere and littered our city with monuments to his ego.  We knew first hand that this was someone who should never be considered for leadership.  We tried to warn the world in 2016.

The repercussions of his turbulent presidency divided America and rattled New York City beyond imagination.  Remember how we were jolted by crisis in early 2020, as a virus swept the world.

We lived with Donald Trump’s bombastic behavior every day on the national stage, and we suffered as we saw our neighbors piling up in body bags.

The man who was supposed to protect this country put it in peril, because of his recklessness and impulsiveness. It was like an abusive father ruling the family by fear and violent behavior.  That was the consequence of New York’s warning getting ignored. Next time, we know it will be worse.

Make no mistake: the twice-impeached, 4-time indicted Donald Trump is still a fool. But we can’t let our fellow Americans write him off like one. Evil thrives in the shadow of dismissive mockery, which is why we must take the danger of Donald Trump very seriously.

So today we issue another warning. From this place where Abraham Lincoln spoke — right here in the beating heart of New York — to the rest of America:
This is our last chance.

Democracy won’t survive the return of a wannabe dictator.

And it won’t overcome evil if we are divided.

So what do we do about it?  I know I’m preaching to the choir here.  What we’re doing today is valuable, but we have to take today into tomorrow – take it outside these walls.   We have to reach out to the half of our country who have ignored the hazards of Trump and, for whatever reason, support elevating him back into the White House. 

They’re not stupid, and we must not condemn them for making a stupid choice.  Our future doesn’t just depend on us. It depends on them.

Let’s reach out to Trump’s followers with respect.  Let’s not talk about “democracy.”  “Democracy” may be our holy grail, but to others it is just a word, a concept, and in their embrace of Trump, they’ve already turned their backs on it. 

Let’s talk about right and wrong.  Let’s talk about humanity. 

Let’s talk about kindness.  Security for our world. 

Safety for our families. 

Decency. 

Let’s welcome them back. 

We won’t get them all, but we can get enough to end the nightmare of Trump, and fulfill the mission of this “Stop Trump Summit.”

[CALL TO ACTIVISM @CalltoActivism]

How incredible is this?

“The famous Italian diver Enzo Maiorca dove into the sea of ​​Syracuse and was talking to his daughter Rossana who was aboard the boat. Ready to go in, he felt something slightly hit his back.

He turned and saw a dolphin. Then he realized that the dolphin did not want to play but to express something. The animal dove and Enzo followed.

At a depth of about 12 meters, trapped in an abandoned net, there was another dolphin. Enzo quickly asked his daughter to grab the diving knives.

Soon, the two of them managed to free the dolphin, which, at the end of the ordeal, emerged, issued an "almost human cry" (describes Enzo). (A dolphin can stay under water for up to 10 minutes, then it drowns.)

The released dolphin was helped to the surface by Enzo, Rosana and the other dolphin. That’s when the surprise came: she was pregnant!

The male circled them, and then stopped in front of Enzo, touched his cheek (like a kiss), in a gesture of gratitude and then they both swam off.

Enzo Maiorca ended his speech by saying: “Until man learns to respect and speak to the animal world, he can never know his true role on Earth.”

[Robert Mitchell @CllrRob]

@fasc1nate Lest we forget 🥀