What, one wonders, did Chuka Umunna think he was doing last night? What, when he put forward an amendment to the Queen’s speech demanding the government guarantee Britain’s place in the single market, was he hoping to achieve?

It’s not that I think his position was wrong, exactly. I’m a card-carrying remainiac, or certainly would be, if anyone out there had gone so far as to actually found an EU fan club. And while I’m a bit miffed at the damage leaving will do to Britain’s global standing and the loss of my European passport, it’s the economic aspect of Brexit that actually frightens me.

Dropping out of the single market, after all, is likely to mean footloose multinationals moving their operations from London or Edinburgh to cities in countries sensible enough to have stayed inside it. Leaving the customs union will be, if anything, worse, and mean a tide of paper work needs dealing with, every time a lorry crosses the Channel. Both these things are likely to reduce our international trade.

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And so, when I heard Umunna arguing that leaving the single market will make us worse off, I found myself nodding along. “The IFS,” the Streatham MP told the House of Commons last night, “has forecast that leaving the single market could cause a £31bn hit to the public finances – which will make it all the more difficult to end years of austerity.” Or, to paraphrase his parliamentary colleague Alison McGovern: our best shot at stopping austerity is to stay in the single market.

On the whole, then, I think Umunna’s position is an entirely sensible one, and the fact the majority of the political class are still pulling the country towards the edge of a cliff is faintly baffling to me. Nonetheless, I find myself asking: what did he think he was doing? What was his best-case scenario here?

Because let’s be honest with ourselves: this amendment was never, ever going to pass. Even the most grumpy and pro-European of Tory MPs was not going to vote against the government on the Queen’s speech. And, thanks to Theresa May’s very own friends in the north, the DUP, the government always had enough votes to get its speech through. This was not a moment when the Brexit tide could plausibly be turned.

It was clear, too, that much of the parliamentary Labour party was going to struggle to support this amendment at this time. The party’s membership and its voter base may be largely pro-European. But most of its MPs still believe that respecting the result of the referendum will mean leaving the single market, too – or, at least, are still terrified of the consequences of doing anything that looks like trying to undo the referendum.

Perhaps this will change as the reality of hard Brexit sinks in, and the public makes clear that, on the whole, they’d rather have jobs and pay rises than the ability to tell foreign people to piss off. We can but hope. Last night, though, it was always clear that Umunna’s amendment would fail, and that he’d split the Labour party in the process.

So what was the amendment for? If it was an attempt to embarrass the government, it failed because now, for the first time since the election, the headlines are about Labour splits, rather than Tory weakness. If it was to show the strength of the remain faction then, well, it’s demonstrated that it currently has 101 MPs, which is not quite one-sixth of the House of Commons, and only about a fifth of the Labour party. So it’s failed at that, too.

And if it really was about keeping Britain in the single market, I’m not entirely convinced it’ll help there, either. Labour’s position has so far been helpfully incoherent: the leadership is Eurosceptic, its support base largely isn’t, so everyone seems to have quietly agreed not to talk too much about it.

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That may have infuriated those of us who feel strongly about Europe – but being all things to all men also allowed the party to pull in 40% of the vote last month. More importantly, it left the party with the flexibility to respond to events and changes in the public mood, rather than tying it to a particular position that might just end up dragging it down.

Now that phase might be over. The amendment forced Jeremy Corbyn to tag himself as a Eurosceptic and sack some of the remainers still sitting on his front bench. The pro-European forces look weaker than ever – and after a mere three weeks of unity, the Labour party is split once again.

So what was all this meant to achieve, exactly?