Spices

In typical British fashion, they hoard them, not because they want to spice their food, but so everyone else has to eat bland food and like it, like they do.

Homophones strike again!
Horde: Noun, "A horde of Football players ate everything I had prepped".
Hoard: Verb, "I've been hoarding rice and 5.56 for when FEMA comes by"
Bonus third meaning because english is a fuck
Hoard: Noun, "The foragers came back with a hoard of edible mushrooms"

what were the british doing with all those spices anyway

Keeping them in museums, like everything else they pillaged.
Selling at markup to French of course. Some of them were ridiculously expensive like saffron was at some points costing its weight in gold.

I mean, most dishes developed in Britan since the colonial period do contain many spices (eg British-Indian food). Traditional food pre-spices doesn't, like most traditional food of the northern hemisphere.

From what I've read on culinary history, traditional foods would have been spiced heavily at the time just with local herbs and things that are absolutely everywhere on the planet like garlic and onions. Blandness is a much more recent problem caused by war rationing and mass produced processed/ready made foods that pretty much annihilated traditional cooking knowledge and warped the public's tastes around the blandest slop possible.
Historically people would find basically any way possible to make food taste better or at least more interesting within the limits of their environment, and it's only relatively recently that "idk just throw more salt, sugar, and fat on it and that's all the flavor the slop needs" became the culturally dominant culinary theory.
- I mean sure, I do agree. But that's more an issue in all the western world, than specifically the UK.

Poor people can't afford good taste more news at 5

- tbf the global south where the euros looted spices from is where they were endemic, and many vegg and spices still can't be grown in europe, making them more expensive. it's true that in recent decades it's definitely gotten more affordable, but it's really only been since the end of ww2. 2-3 generations isn't long enough to develop a very rich culinary tradition
- Also true for fish. And sausage.

Can you imagine being invaded by a bunch of losers from half a world away just because their food tastes boring?I still can't believe that that's a thing. Like just ask people to open a branch of your favorite Indian or Chinese restaurant in your country like damn. I like kimchi but I'm not going to suggest invading Korea over it.