Short term I'd agree with that Sorry but long term BA have been on to a loser for a while economically. They haven't been as price-competitive as the cheap airlines taking advantage of sweetheart deals with airports etc for a while now, they've mostly been coasting on their luxury image. But a luxury image doesn't hold if you're 'the world's grounded airline', cos all the free booze in the world doesn't make up for a 48-hour wait at Heathrow.
You can't completely reinvent a multi-billion pound enterprise to compete in an ultra-cheap market you aren't set up for (they tried with their short-lived airline Go but sold it because it wasn't a 'core' asset) though without leaving yourself fatally open to competitors, which meant going budget was out.
So given that their market share is limited by their niche status, a niche which has been increasingly shown to be a rather smaller one than their current size would suit, they've been sqeezing the costs at the other end and doing their best to increase the margins by attacking their workforce. They can't touch the pilots, cos Balpa is a very tough union to crack (though Ryanair have been made very sure Balpa never got very far there).
So they go after the weaker types, Gate Gourmet merely being a relatively easy peripheral to farm out to the Swiss, then pressure from the outside so you don't look like the bad guy when they end up having to use strikebreaker tactics to produce the results you're pushing for as the monopoly contractor.
The calls in the Times to 'reform the seventies working practices' is pretty much a call to destroy their workforce's numbers and living standards to find the necessary reduction in margins to make the company small enough to fit it's niche. However, without looking into their accounts in more depth, it's still fairly easy to find potential savings, and more importantly potential space for growth within the company's niche which would not necessitate that kind of tactic.
It's the usual leftist stuff, of consulting the workforce to find cost cutting procedural measures, consulting both staff and customers to find out what they think would make the company attractive on a wider scale (staff almost always know), and cutting the head off the management structure. It's also the relatively simple trick of not getting bogged down in your 'core values' if those core values aren't going anywhere. BA is not dying because its workforce is a seventies style union ransoming unit, it's dying because it is being utterly outmanouvered by its opponents.
