BAA may be forced to sell TWO London airports!

[Seat62K]

I heard BAA's Rudd being interviewed on BBC Radio 4 this morning and some of what he said was risible. He claimed that Heathrow is not in competition with other BAA airports but instead competes with Continental airports. What this ignores is that the south east of England is one of the largest markets in the world as far as air travel is concerned (100 million pax per annum? - some of them transferring, of course) and both residents and visitors would benefit from being able to choose between airports with different owners (I exclude Luton and London City from my argument, for obvious reasons). I live in this region and when travelling on routes with flights from more than one airport, I always take the "airport experience" into account. This is "competition", except that it's not genuine because as far as the three main airports are concerned BAA owns them all.
I think, too, that there may be some merit in selling off individual terminals but this would need a bit more thought and couldn't, of course, be implemented at STN. (Perhaps Ryanair should build and run its own terminal at STN...)
P.S.
The Ferrovial consortium is not entirely to blame for the current state of London's three main airports. It's just not possible to argue the the rot set in only after it took over ownership. Some of the anti-Spanish comments I've seen are pathetic (and offensive). I assume that the Tories chose not to break up the BAA on privatisation partly (mainly?) because the company was worth more in one piece. If you want to go back far enough, the problem started with the Roskill Commission's failure to recommend an entirely new airport for London. Maplin Sands was my choice at the time. Imagine if the French had not built a new airport at Roissy; Paris would today be struggling with Orly and Le Bourget! New airports, I'll admit, were not always the solution (look at Montreal Mirabel). Although we now have the benefit of hindsight, the demand for travel to/from the South East has grown rapidly and even current ideas such as a third runway and a sixth terminal at LHR may turn out in the longer run really to be no more than "stop gap" measures.