It was ridiculous. If you attack someone attacking something you oppose you undermine them and you undermine the argument they're making and you weaken their attack on the thing you oppose. Otherwise how would consensus across the parties ever be achieve. You and I both want A but we have a different view on B, so when you're making a positive argument for A it makes absolutely no sense for me to attack you on our disagreement on B. We can do that later if we want.
If you can't agree with someone on an issue unless you disagree on nothing else then that's pretty childish.
Cross party committees would never exist. The cross party committee on youth crime would just be people sat arms folded looking the other way and sulking because even though they might agree on a policy to tackle youth crime they disagree on environmental policy so decide they can't do anything but attack each other on the issue they have differences over.
It would be absurd. Families, circles of friends and work places aren't like that, there people agree to disagree, find areas of common interest and get along. Wanting politics and political debate to be so binary is something I'm not a fan of.
Soubry is still willingly a member of the party who are currently implementing Brexit, a party who are currently in a minority government and can't afford to lose many more MP's. She could leave if she wanted to, and join Labour or the Lib Dems, or stand as an independent. If a few more with similar opinions followed, the government would potentially collapse.
Soubry was a prominent Cabinet minister in a government who regularly scapegoated the EU for all of our woes, and the government who offered this referendum to placate hard-right Tories/Kippers. If she'd been so serious about her continuing EU membership, she could've opposed this referendum, spoke out against Cameron's scapegoating of the EU, or ensured the terms of the referendum were more specific in what leaving would entail and thus beneficial to the Remain campaign. She didn't.
Her action against Brexit thus far has been about the equivalent to McCain's actions against Trump; occasionally she's been a thorn in the government's side but for the most part she's continually placated them, and hasn't kicked up
that much of a fuss or achieved anything substantive. Indeed, if anything she's been a beneficial voice for May to have; someone to assure more liberal Tories that the party hasn't went off the deep end, and that they still have respectable voices to be listened to.
Yes, there needs to be room for cooperation. Yes, as much as I don't like Soubry or agree with most of what she says, I do agree she's better to be dealing with than JRM or Boris or Gove. Yes, everything would fall apart if parties didn't work together on occasion. But at the same time we shouldn't be foaming at the mouth every time a Tory gives some mild criticism of Brexit without ever actually
doing anything about it. Especially when that very same Tory helped create the conditions and social atmosphere which lead to it in the first place.
And additionally, much as I do
partially agree with the idea that we need compromise and cooperation in government, it should also be noted at the same time that for a lot of left-wingers, these are essentially useless sentiments which are a disguised way of saying a bunch of centrists who occasionally disagree on some small issues should all be jovial with each other, safe in the knowledge they won't have to face any anger from the public for their political choices, and that they'll occasionally exchange power with each other. If you're on the left (the actual left) you'll view the Tory policies of the past half-decade as ones that have wrecked misery and suffering upon the most vulnerable in society. Why
shouldn't you get angry against the people who implemented those policies, if that's the case? And what's cooperation and compromise achieved for the likes of Miliband in recent years, who was seen as not representing anything and who was swiftly defeated? A lot of the successful politicians in recent decades (including the likes of Thatcher) got where they did not through careful compromise but through conviction and force of will. Thatcher didn't shift the economic paradigm to the right (a paradigm we're now still in) by being nice and cosy to those who disagreed with her.