doghead,

They are entitled to change your flight like that I'm afraid so there's little you can do about it. Because it's not a major change to your booking, you'll probably have to pay a cancellation fee if you decide to cancel your flights for a refund.

Darren

This close to departure you probably won't be able to cancel even if you were earlier. And the delay isn't enough to meet compensation rules.

One thing springs to mind, if the flight suffers an actual delay on the day you could try adding the two delays together, that might make a difference to compensation. Not really good news though.

This sort of multi drop operation seems to be getting more common, when I was at Manchester in September there was a flight to Turkey calling at Glasgow! Passengers sitting on the right would probably have been able to see Manchester about 2½ hours after first leaving!!