Richard's final speech in Wednesday's strip was very of its time. I don't think Student loans had been started up at that point, but the Conservatives were about to bring them in. Imagine, Britain was once a country that valued education so much it paid for its citizens to go to university. Now it thinks it's doing a service to leave students in grinding debt as soon as they've grauduated.
The poll tax was one of Margaret Thatcher's madder ideas. It was a flat local tax. Not a flat tax in the way some of the Republicans currently vying for nomination in the US are suggesting, where everyone pays the same percentage of their income in tax. This was a flatter flat tax, in that everyone had to pay the same amount of money - it didn't matter whether you were an impoverished student in a bedsit or a millionaire living on one of your twelve mansions, you paid the same amount. As I said - mad. It was wildly unpopular, as it struck against the British sense of fair play. There were protests, people were imprisoned for refusing to pay, and then riots in Trafalgar Square, and a year later it was replaced with the property based system now, where the amount of local tax you pay is based on the value of the house you live in - not the best of solutions but at least there's some sort of consideration of the ability to pay.
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