I would love to get YorkyKopite's take on this. I believe it is ingrained specifically into the English psyche as a hangover from Norman times and in later years landlordism.
Given our present situation (the Tories in power since 2010) I can see why the thesis is attractive. But I think it's wrong.
Class is the curse of British life, especially English life. But I don't think it's true to say that we love hierarchy more than any other comparable nation or that historically we have been slow to assert our rights against overweening power. Yes the monarchy sets the tone for much public life in this country today, but this is also the country that decapitated a King when it was still a highly unusual thing to do. We also clipped the wings of the monarchy as early as 1688 and they have remained clipped ever since. The rest of Europe suffered royal absolutism for the next 100 years (250 years in most cases). Can you imagine the British working class of the period 1860-1914 tolerating the Kaiser or the Tsar? I can't.
We also managed to remove the religious yoke before others did and never had a vast peasantry in absolute thrall to the bigotry, obscurantism and ignorance that was the stock-in-trade of religious leaders (whether Catholic or Protestant). Our trade unions were not 'Catholic trade unions' or 'Protestant trade unions' as they were in so much of central Europe. They were simply trade unions - secular, class conscious, bloody-minded in defence of what were considered to be their natural rights. The ideas of free association and free speech were vivid in Britain long before they took root elsewhere. Someone mentioned the interwar period as a time of shame for the British. True, the Tories somehow managed to rule the roost for most of the period, despite the catastrophe of the Great War and the tragedy of the Great Depression. But the British working class never fell for totalitarianism in the 1930s unlike so many other countries in Europe. It knew that Fascism and Communism were bullshit. The trade unions especially knew it. The British working class hated the idea of being ordered about and told what to think.
You mention the Norman Conquest and feudalism. True, to a point. Yet the Norman yoke was never fully accepted, even centuries afterwards. The myth of the 'freeborn Englishman' died hard. And of course feudalism was ended - I'm simplifying here - by what? By the Peasants' Revolt and powerful and urgent feeling that the villein was as good as his lord. "When Adam delved and Eve span/Who was then the Gentleman", John Ball said in the year of the Revolt. Clearly many agreed with that philosophy. "The poorest he that is in England hath a right to live as the greatest he" - Thomas Rainborough, the Leveller, at the Putney Debates during the Civil War. Show me that kind of advanced thinking in any other part of Europe at the time. These ideas didn't come from nowhere. They clearly struck a chord. There is clearly more than deference and a love of hierarchy going on.
In short I think it's too easy to look at the enduring class system and conclude that the Brits are somehow especially prone to deference. The historical record suggests otherwise.