Britain has never recognised the concept of 'unequal' marriages or 'morganatic' marriages. The Europeans were always more 'snobbish' about that while the British always took the view that a wife was automatically raised to the status of the husband on marriage.
I will assume that "the Europeans" means "the non-British Europeans", as British culture is categorically European.
It is not true that Britain has never recognized the concept of morganatic marriages. The British legal view is that a wife is automatically raised to the status of the husband on marriage
if the husband's status was higher than that of wife before the marriage. Thus, no morganatic marriage is possible under those circumstances (except when you are Wallis Simpson). However, when the status of the wife is higher than that of the husband, she is not lowered to his status on marriage and he is not raised to hers. (If a baroness marries a male commoner, she is not automatically lowered to commoner and he is not automatically raised to baron.) Such a marriage is factually "morganatic", even though most Britons today would not use such an old-fashioned description.
Neither was Britain the only European country where the law dictated that a lower-status wife was automatically raised to the status of a her husband on marriage. That was also - formerly - the law in Sweden. Princes of the Swedish Royal House sometimes married unequally (a recognized concept in Sweden), but never morganatically. Their unequal wives were raised to whatever rank their husbands were permitted to keep.
It is true that British
law has never recognized the concept of unequal marriages, but British society certainly has. It was no accident that the future King George III banned both of his siblings who married non-royals from court, or that the Royal Marriages Act 1772 was enacted to safeguard against similar future marriages.
Any "marriage" which breached the requirement to obtain permission in the terms of the Royal Marriages Act 1772 was not legally recognized in the United Kingdom. This meant that women such as Sarah Louise Fairbrother not only were
not raised to the status of their royal "husbands", but were denied even the ordinary legal perks of marriage, since they were not married in the eyes of the law.
Personally, I would say that this British approach of forcing women whose status was too lowly to become royal princesses to remain as illicit lovers was more "snobbish" than allowing them to become morganatic wives would have been.
