Respect campaign dies a miserable death

Sorry FA, but I'm afraid the Respect campaign has died.
¶ The poor mite, rather like Dickens' Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol, never really stood a chance. Despite the best intentions of its parents, the campaign died, suffocated by contempt for authority and the attitude that winning conquers over honesty, fairness and all those values we're expected to uphold.
¶ The campaign, in my humble opinion, never really got going at a grassroots level. My experience at a park level in Kent over the past 10 years in fact shows the opposite. Behaviour is getting worse. Players and managers are more brutish and less accepting of referees' decisions than ever.
¶ At a senior level, where player behaviour has a deep influence on the playing fields of Britain, week after week on our teleivison screens we see evidence that referees are not being shown respect. In fact they are being shown anything but.
¶ Personally, the only evidence I see of the Respect campaign is the ritual team handshake before every match and an email sent to me after every game asking me to mark teams' behaviour out of five. In two years of filling out these forms, I have never had a response or any form of feedback, so I can only assume they're being fed into a database somewhere and that an impressive powerpoint presentation will be put together at some stage to justify the cost of the campaign.
¶ I don't watch childrens' football very much so I can't make a call on whether behaviour has changed there. It has been a real problem area for some years now, mainly because of parents abusing referees.
¶ In the last couple of years, I've either experienced personally or learned through refereeing colleagues of direct threats of violence from players and mass fights involving weapons (very few of these thank the Lord). Worst of all, however, is the systematic intimidation of referees by whole teams.
¶ From the very first whistle, teams place an intolerable pressure on referees with non-stop dissent. It's organised too. When one player is booked for dissent, he falls silent to avoid a second yellow, allowing other players to take over responsiblity for putting pressure on the ref.
¶ Coaches scream abuse from the touchline. The civil manager is a rarity these days.
¶ It's harsh I know, but I was pleased to hear today that Neil Warnock had been fired by QPR. He paints himself as a jovial fellow, and is clearly intelligent, but it was nice to see his tactic of blaming match officials for every defeat and conceded goal had failed to keep him in a job. The sigh tof Warnock, crimson-faced and veins bulging with fury as he berates a 4th official, was not edifying at all.
¶ I'll be delighted to be proved wrong by the FA, but I won't accept stats wheeled out to show there has been a percentage fall in yellow and red cards. I'm there, every Saturday afternoon, as are my refereeing colleagues, and none of them see any improvement. At the top level, the proof is in the pudding, or on the SKY screens.
¶ The elite referees take home a salary of around £80,000, I'm told. That's a lot of money, but frankly, I'm not sure it's worth it to have ordure heaped on you once or twice a week.