It's better to be busy and vibrant and not do longhaul than it is to be something like the ghost town at Birmingham with its handful of marginal
longhaul routes and otherwise uninspiring smattering of short and medium haul options
Ghost town? With 9 million pax per year? And multiple daily mainline ops by SK, AF, LH, SN, LX?
I wouldn't call Venice, Marrakech, Rome, Krakow, Lyon, Dubrovnik and Stockholm (all served from BHX) uninspiring unless you think frying yourself on the beach and larging it up in an Irish bar is what you call inspiration
Double daily DXB, daily (in summer) EWR and 4 x weekly ISB marginal long haul?
Admittedly there are glaring gaps in the short haul network at BHX. Yes, BRS has done a fantastic job in short haul route development with a quite a number of routes flown that BHX doesn't have and huge pax growth in recent years because of that (I have flown from there on a number of occasions when there was not a suitable option fron BHX). But get your facts right before you make such a sweeping statement about another airport that is also going (albeit not very spectacularly) from strength to strength. Unlike CWL.