Heathrow's chaos is indicative of a wider national malaise

We have the oddest and most regressive constitution for private ownership anywhere in western capitalism

It was not Heathrow's finest hour. The pain was there to see in the pictures of thousands of passengers delayed without information, left to camp for hours on inhospitable floors. Less visible were many thousands of others, like some friends of mine, who, courtesy of the internet and the closure of Heathrow's slip roads, thankfully never made it to the airport at all. The freakishly heavy snowfall would have disrupted any world airport, but not for as long as Heathrow, which was still suffering acute delays three or four days later.

Most passengers could see that the airport owners' priorities were not theirs. The acres dedicated to retailing compared to the paltry investment in snowploughs were signal enough of what British Airports Authority cares about – generating the cash flow to give Ferrovial, the ultimate Spanish owner, the interest and dividend payments to make its over-expensive asset pay. Heathrow is the Manchester United or Liverpool FC of the airport world, an organisation which was expensively taken over by outsiders and which now has to create the surpluses to pay off the debts incurred in its purchase. The consequence is an extraordinary vulnerability to any shock .

It is phenomenally stupid – a combination of the pre-financial crash boom in which banks showered credit like confetti on allcomers regardless of the consequences, together with Britain's callow approach to ownership. The country has never seriously debated what good ownership of assets might constitute – whether by a football club or a public company. Instead, the response to the social and economic irresponsibility of some private ownership has been to call for nationalisation and public ownership, while the response to the waste and lack of innovation of some public ownership has been to call for private ownership. There has been too little attempt to think through what the constitution and process of ownership might be that would create great owners, whether in the public or private sector, or among the many other forms of ownership, ranging from partnership to co-operatives.

Instead, with the rise of the neoconservative right, there has just been the unquestioning assumption that the best form of ownership is private; in Britain, that necessarily means our idiosyncratic variant of the public limited company. This represents the oddest and most regressive constitution for private ownership anywhere in western capitalism. British company law makes no requirement on shareholders and directors to have any obligation to be good stewards of their assets, their employees or their customers. Shareholders' rights to do what they want with their shares to maximise their immediate value is more stark than anywhere else and directors' responsibilities are only to serve the interests of these madly unconstrained shareholders.

The debacle at Heathrow is one consequence of this insouciance, but the wreckage stretches across the economic landscape. British companies think, strategise, innovate and invest their way to success far less than their competitors in different ownership regimes. They know the penalty for one wrong move is to be taken over as responsibility-free shareholders sell out to some opportunistic predator advised by London's network of lawyers, accountants and investment bankers who grow fat on the lush fees. This Christmas, a great British company, De La Rue, printer of our bank notes and bank notes worldwide, is fighting for its life against a takeover from French rival Oberthur. No such high price is paid in France for the inevitable stutters in any company's life. Last Christmas in Britain, it was Cadbury trying to fend off the attentions of Kraft, which, after the takeover, organised Cadbury's finances so that it paid hundreds of millions less tax. Next Christmas, it will be someone else. The debts for these never-ending takeovers have to be paid for by someone and that is us.

No other capitalist economy organises its affairs in this way. When British Airports Authority was privatised in 1986 – with the not unreasonable aim of making it more innovative and freeing it from the stultifying anti-investment rules of the Treasury – there was no creative thought about what constitution of ownership would be the best for an airport. The Americans require their airports to be owned by, not for, companies whose constitution obliges the owners and managers to put the public interest of efficient and comfortable travel first. In Britain, the issue was not even aired. BAA was simply to become a British public limited company, whose sole objective would be profit maximisation. In 2006, there was the inevitable contested take-over. Ferrovial entered a Dutch auction against a consortium led by the investment bank Goldman Sachs. The price of BAA was bid up to £9bn. In the City, there was much self-congratulation about how shareholder value had been maximised and the various partners in the advising firms all pocketed gigantic fees.

Critics were told that it was vital that Britain stayed open for business, that ownership does not matter. What mattered was that City investment banks, lawyers and accountants had a steady "deal flow" of companies available for takeover and so secure the international position of the City of London. Britain would eventually not have any companies of its own – they would all be foreign-owned, rather as all Wimbledon champions are foreign – but we should be delighted to be the country where so many takeover transactions took place just as we are delighted to host Wimbledon.

This self-serving ideology is betraying Britain. The public limited company is a remarkable institution. Incorporation allows the sharing of risk by many providers of private savings. In return for incorporation, the company receives the licence to trade and to make profits as long as it observes the law of the land. The public company is the great engine of capitalist growth. But the constitution of the company matters. Shareholders and directors can be required to take interests into account other than their own immediate profits. Other countries do this and prosper. Not the British.

The lesson is that ownership counts, a view that as disaster piles on disaster is at last gaining some transaction. I chair the recently established Ownership Commission to investigate how better ownership might be achieved, from both introducing mutuality and co-operatives into the public sector to potential revisions in company law for public companies. It reports next autumn. The subject matter is not just technical stuff. This Christmas, there will be people who are not with those they love thanks to BAA's priorities. Good ownership matters very much indeed and Britain has too little of it.