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A couple of additional points:
The need for high energy food that would stave off hunger for a long time, drove working-class diets towards high protein, high starch foods: meat stews etc. Access to meat as a regular part of that diet was a sign of relative success and stability; it was also indicative of a man's ability to provide for his family. Add to that the increasingly macho nature of working-class culture and food easily becomes coded for gender: fancy food is feminine and feminising, real men need proper food. It also gets tied up with class and national pride: fancy food is for the effete elite, or the effeminate French. And regional pride: none of that fancy southern muck, we eat proper Yorkshire fayre up here.
That's survived some within working-class culture. Cooking is still seen as a very female pursuit in more traditional communities and fancy food is for the soft.
But...'British' cuisine now is not what British cuisine was. Just as 'British' means something very different now than it meant fifty years ago. British cuisine is a multi-ethnic and varied as 'British' is. From the closing decades of the 20th century we began reclaiming older culinary traditions, adopting new culinary traditions and then fusing them altogether into what became British cuisine as it now is.
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