It's a great shame GSS has gone down the swanny, I know a couple of good guys flying there who will now be facing an uncertain future. I'm very glad I'm not in their position. But lets take an honest look at things here. GSS was not a 'career' airline; it was barely an airline in it's own right at all. It existed as the b*st*rd child of Atlas and BA World Cargo, it's genesis was an attempt to circumvent UK employment laws and the scope clause of BA pilots and the only reason there are any UK pilots flying that work at all is because BALPA kicked up a stink about Americans flying it. From that ignoble beginning came an almighty stink from BA pilots about the blatant scope-busting attempt from BA. The outcome of that was that the only way in which BA were going to be able to outsource the flying was to give some of the P1 positions to BA secondees. It wasn't a case of 'ES should have resisted', or 'BA pilots stole my command'. Without the secondees there'd be no GSS, no GSS commands and no GSS employment at all. That's the long and short of it. It simply wasn't worth BA's while to get into a fight once their transatlantic scopebusting plan started to come off the rails.
If GSS management had aspirations to make the company anything more than a flunky for BAWC they'd have smelled the coffee when IAG took over and found additional sources of business.
People say that BALPA should have intervened to stop the secondees, but frankly thats like saying BALPA should intervene to improve access to 'pay to fly', or should promote a race to the bottom. I'm no fan of BALPA but even I can see that they can hardly be expected to fight for the right to outsource and undercut the work of incumbent UK pilots of any airline. As for BALPA Financial Services, I'm really rather perplexed what the relevance of that is to anything, pretty much anyone and everyone uses somebody else.
I've every sympathy for the plight of the GSS guys but the 'arrogant cossetted BA silver spoon w*nkers' is a cracked record. Everybody's heard it before and it's well known the accusations only come from a certain small section of the industry. The pilots of Easyjet, Thomson, Ryanair, Virgin, Monarch et al don't have that particular chip on their shoulders. If ranting and raving is cathartic and makes somebody feel better then so be it, but there's only so much scope for ranting before you start to look crazy.