Why shouldn’t parties be funded by the state?

Taxpayers should not be expected to bankroll parties that they oppose.
The fundamental right to support and sustain causes and interests that are important to us is one to be valued and protected.
Political parties have no less a right to the kind of financial support that charities, faiths, interest groups or social movements routinely enjoy.
A system of state funding for political parties, one that denies basic opportunities for supportive individuals and organisations to contribute, flies in the face of the most basic principles of a pluralist liberal democracy.

The Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act (2000) responded to the growing unease that the decline of broad party memberships allowed wealthy organisations and individuals to wield excessive influence.
The Act addressed expenditure -capping February 2015 local and national electoral spending -and funding, introducing a raft of measures including:
Parties must disclose all donations of goods or services worth more than £5,000 nationally and £1,000 locally.
Any donation from overseas is illegal. Il Parties must declare their donations regularly -as often as every week during election campaigns.
Further legislation – the Electoral Administration Act (2006) and the Political Parties and Elections Act (2009) – introduced even tighter measures, especially to regulate the status of ‘loans’ that had a tendency to lead to ‘honours’.
Regulations have been praised for creating a new era of responsibility in electoral spending. Total spending in 2010 was less than £30 million -an amount similar to the £28.3 million spent by the Conservative Party alone in 1997.

Logic tells us that any criteria for the central funding of parties would be based on historic electoral appeal-either on votes cast or seats won.
Such a system would allow established parties to continue to enjoy the lion’s share of available funds and to collude in squeezing out other parties that threaten to dilute their sole income stream. Yet so-called ‘minor’ political parties are increasingly adept at responding to prevailing moods and social trends.
Many, such as the nationalist parties or the Green Party, defy the status quo only by drawing on the financial resources of their members to mount highly responsive campaigns. Consequently, supporters of the current system of party funding maintain that it allows for both dynamism and prudence:
UKIP’s ability to use the funds of supportive individual backers enabled it to force a major electoral breakthrough in 2014.
The BNP raised and spent a meagre £29,000 in the 2010 general election.
Based on its shock success in the previous year’s European elections (gaining two MEPs) the party could well have enjoyed access to far greater state funds.