Again and again and again and again, the managements of self-regulated industries demonstrate that their personal and corporate financial priorities will invariably over-ride effective and committed compliance with the safety regulations set out for their industry.
This applies equally to things other than safety; the list is endless. Banks, the Press, whatever; self-regulation simply allows them to do what they like unless and until the consequences are so disastrous that their Government sets up an effective enforcement system, usually against a wall of outraged objections and dire warnings of unforeseen consequences from the industry concerned.
The only effective tool that a Government possesses to ensure compliance, even with a regulator in place, is lengthy and unpleasant jail sentences for the Directors and Managements of miscreant businesses, especially when they cause death or injury to, or otherwise seriously harm the public.
And that's where most countries fail; certainly in the UK it seems that Directors and managements can always escape the justice they deserve unless they are a small and easy target. So Gerald Corbett still walks free, as do a large number of crooked and fraudulent bank directors who were trusted to "self-regulate" as they pinned on their knighthoods. And as a consequence, for example, the Directors of the UK's rail companies still neither know about nor feel responsible for their companies' safety management, and our financial industry carries on exactly as before, in spite of the regular, even routine, exposure of scandalous and criminal wrong-doing as a continuous modus operandi.
They do this by throwing junior staff to the wolves, and if necessary suddenly finding they have a form of terminal disease that cures itself miraculously after a year or two, but makes them "unfit for trial" at them time they are charged.