NIGEL FARAGE today parked his tanks on the territory Labour had already conceded when it opted to continue the Tory two-child limit on child benefit and when it removed pensioners’ universal winter fuel allowance.

Long a reactionary and demagogic critic of the so-called “benefit culture” and an active mimic of the narrative so actively promoted by the monopoly media and the Tories that castigates claimants as “scroungers,” the Reform UK leader has, as is his wont, performed a policy switch.

His shameless rationalisation claims the volte face is “not because we support a benefits culture, but because we believe for lower-paid workers, this actually makes having children just a little bit easier for them. It’s not a silver bullet. It doesn’t solve all of those problems, but it helps them.”

He is cashing in on a gift Westminster Labour gave him when it deployed Rachel Reeves’s “fiscal rule” to make the poorest and most vulnerable pay the price for an economy skewed in favour of the rich. Labour’s maladroit signalling that these benefit cuts may now be revised shows the weakness of the original justification made for them.

Farage senses an opportunity and takes it. We can expect more demagoguery whenever Labour policy pivots to the injunctions of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

These two are gendarmes in the service of the neoliberal order and when, as today, the IMF offers faint praise for the performance of Britain’s economy under Keir Starmer it is to make threats. Today it said that the British economy is forecast to grow a smidgeon more than previously predicted for 2025 and it warned that Reeves must stick to her rules on tax and spending.

We may be out of the EU but in essence Reeves’s fiscal rules are a home-grown version of the conditions membership of the EU imposes on member states.

Starmer has cast his deal with the EU as moving on from “political fights” about Brexit while the Tories and Reform UK call the deal a “surrender.”

While for delusional Lib Dems and cynical Labour “Rejoiners” like Alastair Campbell the EU is an oasis of harmony, today it is even more a straitjacket for member states than it was when Britain left.

Tomorrow European Union ministers are meeting in Brussels to discipline their dissident member, Hungary, accused of violating “rule of law” in its justice system and media regulatory framework.

The threat of sanctions exists under Article 7 that allows for the suspension of selected EU membership rights of a member state if it is determined there is a clear risk of a serious breach of the EU’s “founding values,” as framed in Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union.

Hungary is the bad boy of the EU but, significantly, it is not the only one to find itself in conflict with the EU establishment and the leading states most clearly tied to the neoliberal economic order over the EU’s steady embrace of Nato’s war-fighting strategy.

For the moment it is Hungary’s egregiously homophobic ban on the country’s main gay pride march that shares the headlines with a draft law that would clip the wings of foreign-funded NGOs and media.

But Hungary’s real crime is its opposition to the increasingly aggressive foreign policy of the EU grounded in a closer integration with Nato.

At a state level, Hungary and Slovakia oppose the sanctions against Russia. Hungary’s Victor Orban says these sanctions, and the EU’s energy policy, hurt European consumers more than they do Russia and elections, like those in Germany and Romania, show big sections of European public opinion agree.