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Notes -
I think almost the opposite tends to be more true; middle-class guilt is much more powerful than middle-class jealousy. Hence why, though people like Disraeli and Sadler fancied that the aristocracy were better guardians of the poor, it was the barrister Lloyd George and the thoroughly bourgeois Attlee who created the foundations of the modern welfare state. This is really why Oliver disguises himself as poor; because the latent Methodism present in every middle-class Briton tells him that his (unearned) station is actually shameful, and the only acceptable circumstance in which to accept aristocratic largesse is poverty.
I think the class system has changed since Disraeli’s day, there were peculiarities to the Victorian titles economy that even the Edwardians commented upon mockingly.
Part of the film’s subtext is about Fennell’s own ambiguity about her own class and its relationship to ideas of what it means to be middle class. There’s a funny interview where she says something like “I don’t see how the daughter of the ‘king of bling’ [her father’s tabloid-anointed nickname because of his jewelry business] could be really, really posh”. And of course posh people don’t ever really call themselves posh, they call themselves smart or chins or just ‘people like us’.
So there’s a lot of resentment in parts of the upper middle class, maybe lower gentry for people who unironically and unashamedly adopt the trappings of middle-middle class British life. People who actually say “pardon” instead of “what” and all the other u-and-non-u stuff. This then becomes the most embarrassing possible thing.
It’s not a coincidence that the decor of the villain’s comfortable middle class parents’ home is a florid pastiche of the Dursleys’ home in Harry Potter, played completely straight. In real life that’s not what the home of the class of people look like (certainly not in 2007, Rowling might get a pass because Harry Potter is set in the early ‘90s with some anachronisms like the millennium bridge), but in the film it’s a particular kind of gauche horror.
That, in practice, it was actually Lloyd George and Attlee who created the welfare state isn't surprising; it was always the bourgeois classes (both provincial and urban) who were most in tune with the need for something to stave off the radical left. That's probably a small part of the reason why they were successful at doing so in Germany and Britain but not in Russia, where there were fewer of them and they were less powerful.
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