The UK government has never "stopped allowing" tax money going into manned space flight. It just chooses not to currently allocate anything in the BNSC budget towards it. It does not fund the ISS in any way, contribute towards ESA manned spaceflight programmes - which means there is no UK astronaut - but there has been a change of heart recently towards the proposed NASA lunar exploration. The UK may well contribute towards that. That's the very, very brief version of about four recent reports that you could find if you went to start researching via hitting BNSC, RAeS (specifically their Space Group), RAS and BIS.

But I suspect the date you are looking for in relation to what you mention is 1988.