You have to consider the way folk music has been used. It was used, along with other elements of peasant and working class culture, to create a sense of nationhood and override class divisions and consciousness by elements of the ruling class who wanted to create a new nation.

There was no need to do this in England who had no one to rebel against and quite a strong sense of nationhood for other reasons. In fact the last thing the English ruling class wanted in the nineteenth century was to reunite the English working class with their own historical culture which is one of oppression, rebellion and resistance. That still holds largely true today and the comments from media people and politicians are the tip of a larger hostile attitude to English working class song. It is no accident that many prominent people in the folk song revival in England came from the left.