Lord Spandex Masher - Have I not told you billions of times not to exaggerate?! Not having counted them I cannot be certain, but I am reasonably confident that there are not 'millions of experienced short haul operators in Europe and the UK'. That aside, you are totally missing the point of the analogy in due to some unnecessary offence taken over the pecking order of long haul above short haul in your own mind. It clearly goes without saying that anyone applying for a DEC has the experience necessary to fulfil the role. It is self-evident that long-haul experience would be a reasonable pre-requisite for the job at Virgin or Cathay. That means that if in the past Virgin wanted DECs on B747s they would look to BA or the like for the appropriate experience. The key point is that they took people from outside because they had insufficient experience in their own ranks to do the job. Once they had the necessary experience the rules quite rightly changed to favour promotion from within. Would a highly-experienced BA B747-400 Training Captain be a better bet to employ as a Captain at Virgin than a newly promoted, untried-in-role, First Officer from within. Quite possibly - but that is completely irrelevant. The key thing is that as long as a First Officer from within has the necessary experience then you must always promote them first before you look outside - that principle is made to apply at Virgin, Cathay, BA etc and must be made to apply at easyJet. All the pilots at easyJet are saying is that they want the same deal applied to them that applies to other quality airlines. I fail to see the difficulty that some of the people taking part in this debate have with that.
We have significant complexities in our operation compared to the other companies mentioned. Most notably, we have multiple nationalities and numerous European bases with many different contracts plus local tax, pension and social security arrangements to contend with. This makes the corporate representation of all pilots very difficult for both the company and those who represent us. Nonetheless, we can and must be sure that despite these difficulties we stay as one in establishing the basic principles of how our company should run.
Regarding Iver's question about the 737, I will leave it to others with more knowledge to give us the true information on that one.