The whole sad and sorry mess was brought about by a succession of weak, ineffective and generous BA managements allowing the CC Unions/Branches to run IFCE on pretty much their own terms while encouraging CC to believe they were the elite thus making them feel their relative importance to BA's operation was higher than it really is.
Oh how true. Only a week ago I was listening to a CSD tell a manager that the reason gold card holders flew BA was the crew.
The epitome of the current madness to me is the compensation payment for a burned-out light-bulb in the crew rest area. Lights bulbs burn-out for Christ's sake. Crew have emergency torches or could be trained to replace light bulbs as they do at their own homes!
To be precise, the problem is not the lights going out but the lights staying on (their default fail-safe status). It's remarkable how many lighting control panels were affected once the payment became known!