I hope you're wrong too! Adopting the HBW/BirdLife taxonomy (ie, Tobias criteria) would surely represent a significant departure from BOURC TSC's species concept (Helbig et al 2002). And it remains to be seen whether the HBW/BirdLife taxonomy will be continuously updated in response to new data after initial establishment of the new BirdLife baseline in 2016. But perhaps it's possible that BOU might nevertheless look favourably at BirdLife as a 'British' (and conservation-oriented) solution, however radical...?
I guess that for British listers, the final choice of the BOU in the present situation will matter a lot; I'm unconvinced it is the case for non-British people. BOU apparently suddenly decided to abandon their previous role of actor in taxonomy, thus placing themselves out of the game. Unless they can convince the other European ornithological bodies to fire their TC as well (which seems unlikely), European taxonomy will most probably just continue not to be unified without them...
That being said, I feel that,
if their position regarding which one of the four separate international taxonomic groups (which do not exactly seem to succeed (?) in offering a unified taxonomic model either) they intend to follow had been neutral, it would have been quite logical for them to ask the advice of the taxonomists in their own subcommittee one last time, rather than just dismiss them as was done here. This rather looks like a move aimed to discard potential dissenting voices, which in turn suggests an a-priori preference for a taxonomy that TSC members might have advised against... (Please, make this a lie.)
Incidentally, this "News" item makes some odd statements about the AERC TAC. The TAC of course doesn't exist as "five separate national taxonomic groups" trying "to reach a consensus" since 1991, but only since the early 2000s; there was no reason whatsoever to cite the year 1991 in this text, except possibly to give the feeling that the situation has been in place for a still longer time than it has. Besides, in recent years almost no effort was done by anybody (except, arguably, Pierre-André) "to reach a consensus via the Association of European Records and Rarities Committees"; the TAC mainly acted as an entity that flagged issues over which a consensus had been reached, in most cases outside of its own operation. On the other hand, it's not fully true either that the situation boils down to "national groups, each understandably feeling an obligation to retain control of the taxonomy used for their own national lists": the French CAF deliberately abandoned this control in the early years of the TAC, choosing to act only as a voting member, adopting changes on their national list only when they had been adopted by the TAC. (And, yes,
this was a move towards a unified European taxonomy; I can't really see how this is the case with the disbanding of the TSC.)