On this point EF I must disagree with you. I think Southend would have loved to have attracted BA Cityflyer and may have let a rather big opertunity slip by not baggin them! While your points regarding route replication with EZY are valid I don't think this would have been a deciding factor, after all it didn't worry them when Thomson started the weekly Palma, and in both instances load factors (of course no indication to yield ...) have remained healthy. In addition we are talking about a once weekly flight with just over 100 seats to fill, hardly a huge increase in capacity. While Southend has made many mistakes and has oh so many issues at this time, filling planes down to the med does not seem to be one of them and had they wanted to serve Southend I think there is little to no chance the airport would have declined to offer them a deal. In addition the cudos of having BA at your airport would be invaluable when raising your reputation with perspective airlines! Of course the scheduling point is vaild and the Stansted timetable as it stands would not have worked from Southend.
While coaches and trains have been talked to death I just have this point to add. I could not agree more that the late/early train situation needs sorting. However, put yourself on the stobart board for a minute, your major investment is losing money and you are trying to do all you can to balance the books. You have a limited number of flights which on many winter days don't start till later and are finished by 1800. Why on earth would you pay to introduce a coach service? Of course it would help the experience of those pax arriving late on the days there are late flights, however the reality of the situation is those pax have already booked their ticket and are using the airport, yes it may leave them extremely unhappy but this is probably not worth Stobart spending thousand of pounds on a bus service for. While there is this level of traffic and load factors remain healthy on the late arrivals I'm fairly confident any investment of that nature will not be made. What I do think is likely is that the licence was applied for to use as leverage with any potential airlines that raise this as an issue so maybe it is something we will see in the future!