Britain Has Seen This Film Before. It Ends In A Bailout Denis Healey took working farms and small businesses and taxed them at rates up to 75 per cent through his 1975 Capital Transfer Tax, forcing ministers to build hasty reliefs into the system a year later once it became clear the tax as designed threatened to break up the farms and businesses it touched. At the same time, Iran's oil-funded economy was quietly coming apart, inflation rising, corruption spreading, the last channels for peaceful dissent being shut down by a newly declared one-party state. Nobody in the Treasury connected the two stories at the time. Within three years they had collided with a wider British economic crisis: an oil shock rooted in Iran, a winter of discontent, and a Chancellor forced to turn back at Heathrow as sterling came under pressure, before Britain sought what was then the IMF's largest ever bailout. The terms helped bury the government responsible. Fifty years on, the pattern has returned with almost mechanical precision. Rachel Reeves ended full inheritance tax relief on farms and businesses, capping combined relief at £1 million before a 20 per cent effective rate applies, using the same language about closing loopholes that ministers used in 1976 to defend the reliefs they were simultaneously admitting were needed because the original tax was too harsh. Farmers have warned it will force family farms to break up in exactly the way the original Capital Transfer Tax threatened to do. And once again, it is Iran supplying the instability nobody in Whitehall wanted to plan around. The Iran conflict has crippled normal traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. Saudi Arabia's East-West pipeline, the alternative route built for precisely this scenario, was knocked out by attack and has only now resumed at reduced capacity. Diesel now averages 195.5p a litre, up from 141.65p a year ago, a rise that falls hardest on the hauliers, farmers and rural communities who cannot simply drive less. The government's own figures make the point better than any critic could. Fuel duty receipts for April to August this year came in £300 million higher than the same months last year, proof that the Treasury is already extracting more from diesel-dependent communities before the scheduled duty rises even begin in January. A freeze bought time. It did not buy protection, and the protection expires exactly when the pressure is worst, in a rural economy already squeezed by the same instinct to tax productive assets that accompanied the economic disorder which ended in the 1976 IMF bailout. What has not changed across fifty years is the sequencing. A Labour Treasury reaches first for the assets of farmers and small businesses, calls it fairness, and only weeks or months later discovers that the design went too far. Iran builds towards a crisis in plain sight while ministers remain absorbed in their own fiscal arithmetic, until the bill for both arrives at once, in fuel bills, in food prices, in borrowing costs and in a rural economy that was never asked whether it wanted to be tested twice by the same mistake in one lifetime. With gilt yields sitting near multi-decade highs and government borrowing already running above forecast, the markets are beginning to ask a question Whitehall would rather dismiss: whether another call to the IMF is really as unthinkable today as it was assumed to be before Denis Healey turned back at Heathrow. One small point of interest before closing. The Chancellor navigating this crisis is John Healey, no relation to Denis Healey, though he inherits more than the surname: a Treasury committed to the same kind of tax raid, and another Iran-shaped energy crisis arriving at precisely the wrong moment.