In the shopping precinct of Derby city centre a great British industry is staging its last stand. There are no guns or whooping Sioux here – instead, you have a gaggle of volunteers in T-shirts and linen trousers clutching petitions to save the local train manufacturer. Except that Bombardier is also the last train-maker in Britain, and the campaigners gathered by the ram statue know they're playing for big stakes. "We gave the world the railways," says Labour MP Chris Williamson. "Now we're about to give it away."

Melodramatic? I don't think so. Last month, the government put Germany's Siemens rather than Bombardier of Derby in pole position for its £1.5bn contract to make carriages for the Thameslink route between Bedford and Brighton. The result, announced the British firm last week, is that more than 1,400 employees – almost half the Derby staff – will lose their jobs. And that looks like a down payment on the losses to come: of the four contracts Bombardier staff are working on now, three will be finished before Christmas, and there is no new business on the horizon. The Thameslink job is widely seen as the precursor for the much larger £16bn Crossrail route – Siemens is now well-placed to take that, too. Showing me around the vast plant on Litchurch Lane yesterday, communications manager Heidi Lee reminisced about how it was the birthplace of the InterCity 125, and pointed to the men drilling into new carriages for the London Underground. Then she paused: "In a couple of years' time, this might all be empty." And that was from a payrolled company booster.

So if Britain's train-manufacturing industry is on its deathbed, who put it there? In the row that broke out last week, the press and Labour politicians agreed on the culprit: the government, for its short-sightedness in awarding a vital contract to a foreign company. But tick-box civil servants who just happened to make a bad call and their blinkered ministerial masters isn't the whole, depressing picture. Go through the figures, wander round the factory – and you also get a yarn about how a once-great business (and a workforce that must count as among the most skilled in the world) has been passed around from multinational owner to multinational owner until it looks decidedly dog-eared. In short, you end up with a story about much of what's gone wrong with the British economy.

In the fish-wrapper jingoism that tabloids indulged in about the Germans taking our jobs under perfidious European rules, very few made the obvious, if inconvenient, point: their supposed champion of homegrown manufacturing is actually headquartered in Montreal and listed on the Toronto stock exchange. Indeed, since British Rail Engineering Limited was privatised in 1989, it has been run by a consortium led by a Swiss-Swedish firm, passed on to Germany's Chrysler before being flogged to Canada's Bombardier. Sukhdev Johal at Royal Holloway, University of London likens the company to "a foster-child, passed around from home to home". In the process, the workforce has shrunk time and again, and the firms supplying it have dwindled too. Just over the road from Bombardier is a massive industrial park of 20 buildings that all used to supply the Litchurch works: half of it stands empty now.

The best thing that Bombardier has offered the Derby staff must be security: some of the local managers were once apprentices here, and thanks to a big union presence have ploughed a lot of money into excellent staff training. But they have not invested in the equipment or premises: this is a branch office backwater of a major multinational. And at times, it looks like a museum of industrial heritage: there are gashes in the brickwork, and old slate roofs.

This story of long-running underinvestment is borne out by analysis of Bombardier Transportation's balance sheets over the past decade, prepared by the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change at Manchester University and given exclusively to the Guardian. Academics there looked at a shorthand measure of investment in machinery and building – the depreciation and amortisation of assets: they found it was a tiny 3.9% of all value added between 2002 and 2009. The interest repayments on debt on the other hand was 9.1%. The Cresc team then looked at Bombardier Inc's European holding company, and found the results were almost the reverse: interest repayments were only 3% of value added and big investment was a whopping 10.1%. So the picture is of a European business pumped up on investments and increasingly exporting, and a British office that, as the Cresc team put it, is "debt encumbered and going nowhere".

Bombardier claimed yesterday that this was because of accounting differences between continental Europe and Britain, but when asked what big infrastructure they had bought, company managers did not have a response. Chairman Colin Walton said that the Thameslink contract would have encouraged more investment – "and helped us move into the premier league". But the thing is, this company used to be in the premier league.

There is an overlap here with the other big story of the past week. Thatcher's children in Westminster have had to learn a hard lesson this summer: who owns a company matters. Anyone who still needs convincing of that should ask themselves how far would the phone-hacking story have got had the Guardian's Nick Davies worked for a News International title. Conversely, would British train-making be in better health had it been run as a serious concern, rather than as a distant outpost of a foreign empire?