"you will know that working class people don't really get anything you would call folk music
Not any more they don't - I agree with you, though there are others on this forum who wouldn't.
Not the point.
The songs that I call 'folk' were a staple part of the culture of working people right up to comparatively recently.
They createdf the songs (I believe), passed them on, remade them in different forms and created more songs.
We got the tail-end of them, often from people who had never been part of a living tradition, but had remembered what their grandparents grandparents had remembered - third or fourth hand.
The songs we have acquired of part of the culture of working people.
Personally I still find a great deal of entertainment I many of them - I remember hearing the 300 year old 'The Duke of Atholl's Nurse' for the first time, chuckling my way through the singing of it and then thinking how it compared to a classic piece of slapstick comedy.   
I still feel the hairs on the back of my neck bristling when I hear a well-sung version of Sheath and Knife.
We were talking to the young woman who is producing our MacColl programmes and she described how she visited Edinburgh last year and spent a week-end listening to knife-edged sung ballads that moved a roomful of people to tears.
These songs and ballads are as timeless and as important as Shakespeare - I believe that some of them are as skillful.
Whether working people like it or not, they are our heritage.
I believe that they still have a part to play in entertaining us, in fact I know they have - I've spent enough time in folk clubs to have learned that.
If you don't like then, fine, all I can say is, "I'm sorry for your loss" - you really don't know what you are missing.
That aside, if today's generation has abandoned them, it doesn't mean that others will do the same.
Working people as an identifiable group no longer have a creative culture of their own, it has been usurped by a musical form manufactured, pre-wrapped and marketed to make some money for a few privileged people and much more for investors who culd equally have put their money into selling frozen peas - not my idea of a working-class culture, sorry and all that.
"but it forms a sub-set of the wider meaning"
Sorry to disagree Howard, but as far as the general population is concerned, there is no "wider meaning".
Most people in Britain live and die without ever the word 'folk song' passing their lips - our failure.
Id there is an alternative meaning, where do I find it, or more importantly, where do I point to to help others to find it.
Thanks to deliberate or thoughtless misuse, Folk Music has become as accessible as Freemasonry - in Britain anyway.
I haven't looked at the media guide today, but I'm almost certain that I will be able to turn on the T.V or radio tonight and listen to or watch a half-decent programme on folk music - unfortunately, I won't be able to listen because I'll be at one of the four weekly music and song sessions taking place in this one street town in the West of Ireland.
In a couple of weeks time, on our annual Irish Culture Night I'll be attending a public interview with 80 year old piper, flute playe and singer, Michael Falsey, at our local Traditional music centre (look up O.A.C. (Oidhreacht an Chlair") or Clare Music Makers)
All of this was achieved by a few people who knew what their music was and where they wanted it to go.
Jim Carroll