The unwashed masses in the regions operating franchises are seen as a threat to to their idle rich life style and represent a threat as they are prepared to do a day's work for inferior terms.
Quite! Although at least we're working hard in the regions covering your (our?) work instead of sitting around waiting for broken Embraers to be fixed again. "Ooops, broken again, better go home". Remind me again, are you employed as airline pilots or rental car drivers?
I believe that the BA CC are effectively preventing GB from further expansion by preventing the transfer of further loss-making routes to them, something which has apparently been to the benefit of both companies since the dawn of franchising
Sadly wrong. Firstly its not our fault the routes are losing money, its the ineptitude and overheads of Waterworld that are hurting them. You are welcome to the routes if you think you can make them profitable, but only if you're going to take a proportionate share of the Waterside staff and costs. What were not happy to let you do is cherry-pick those routes and then leave us with fewer routes to support the same Waterside mass. Secondly the purpose of franchises is to develop routes to a stage where the parent carrier can operate them profitably, then the franchise goes and develops new routes. Thats expansion, what you propose is nothing more than route theft. The purpose of the franchise is not to mask corporate waste and inefficiency in the parent carrier by allowing them to easily attribute costs to the wrong people (flight/cabin crew). Perhaps you can explain why GB can operate the MPL route at a profit the day after EOG cut it, despite the fact that GB pay their flight and cabin crew almost exactly the same money as EOG?