The sentence that follows may be among the rarest in British newspapers, but here goes. A big hand for the European commission for doing an excellent thing. This week, the commission ruled that Belgium has been granting an illegal tax break to at least 35 global companies. The Belgian government will now be forced to recover the unpaid taxes – equivalent to about £530m – from the companies. Last October, it was Luxembourg that was in the firing line – ordered by the commission to recover up to £22.5m from a subsidiary of Fiat. The Netherlands also ran into grief last year over a deal it made with Starbucks. All three countries have been caught out by a series of investigations led by the EU’s competition commissioner, Margrethe Vestager, into countries cutting special tax deals with massive multinationals. The EU is going after cases where member countries have granted individual tax breaks to big companies, without making them available to all the businesses there.

How much money is at stake? Consider Anheuser-Busch InBev, the largest brewer in the world, the manufacturer of Stella Artois and Budweiser among others, and capitalised on the stock market at $189bn. It has a Belgian subsidiary making profits of about £45m a year. Belgium’s official corporate tax rate is 34%, which implies that the unit should pay about £15m a year in corporation tax. Instead it enjoys a rate of about 4% which brings its corporation tax payments down closer to £1.8m a year. Its parent company also has its headquarters in Belgium and, according to the New York Times, paid “a small fraction of 1% on its reported profit of … $1.93bn [£1.34bn] in 2014”.

Until Monday, all of this was perfectly legal. And there is no suggestion that Anheuser-Busch or any of the other companies have done anything wrong. The fault, according to the ruling, lies with the Belgian government. And the fine is a token one, considering it is on a loophole that has been in place since 2005. But it is a good step in the right direction. Giving million-dollar tax breaks to big companies is a nonsense. The argument for running multinational firms in mainstream economic theory is that they enjoy economies of scale from their size – why then do they need a further hand-up from compliant treasury ministers? This is a practice that favours big business over family enterprise, corporate lobbyist over hard-pressed start-up. The big question is whether the EU commission will now take action on more countries, perhaps Ireland – home to Apple – or Luxembourg again for its arrangements with Amazon.

If the EU commission keeps up this work, it will be doing the cause of Europe a big favour. One of the factors that has done most damage to the reputation of Europe among its own peoples is its friendliness to big capital. The Greeks vote against austerity – repeatedly – and they are rewarded with a Frankfurt-directed shutdown of their entire banking system. Yet countries around the perimeter of the continent are buffeted by a refugee crisis and see the EU respond with foot-dragging. A significant part of popular support for the EU derives from the promises made by Jacques Delors and Helmut Kohl (to name but two of the biggest beasts) that it would act as a social market, standing up for European social standards in the face of globalisation.

If it wants to make good on those promises, the European commission needs to go after precisely such cases where multinationals are getting a sweet deal at the expense of ordinary Europeans. Continental governments cannot simultaneously impose austerity on their voters and shower cash on giant businesses that invest in them. That point applies in spades to David Cameron and George Osborne, who are hacking back the public sector even while repeatedly cutting the corporation tax rate in the name of making Britain fit for some “global race”.

On this point, Ángel Gurría, secretary general of the rich-nations thinktank, the OECD, is completely right: “If big corporations fail to pay tax … it will undermine democracy. This is about the survival of democracy.”

The financial crisis of 2008-9 and the long slump that followed marks an inflection point in modern capitalism. Before, countries would lavish big businesses and shareholders with favours and free money – and justify it as leading to investment. In austere times, the value of that investment must be examined. Does it lead to good jobs and more tax revenue? That is the investment that nations should be chasing, not tax-dodging, favour-seeking, commitment-phobic business.