Shamed Financiers Vow To Be Lovely To Each And Every One Of Us From Now On

As protesters movingly took to the streets of the world’s leading financial centres today, hordes of sobbing money men have been emerging from their corporate towers of glass and steel - begging on their knees for forgiveness, and a chance to put right all of the harm they have selfishly caused to the human race and our suffering planet.

“Mother Gaia, have mercy on my tormented soul,” wailed the head of an international investment bank, tearing off his designer shirt and beating his breast in anguish and remorse. “No more shall the tentacles of my evil global empire subjugate the tribes of the earth. This hippy occupation of the City has truly opened my eyes, and from now on I shall devote my life to distributing its ill-gotten wealth among sustainable local tie-dying operations. Now I beg the joyful face-painting druids of Glastonbury Tor to come forth from this sea of inspirational placards, and paint me humble.”

Job done, chaps - you can all go home now

“I have laid my last disfiguring oil pipeline across the ravaged face of our beautiful planet,” vowed the contrite CEO of a multinational energy exploiter. “Even as I speak, my reformed underlings are dismantling the hated machinery of distribution. From now on, resources will benefit only those in whose sacred ground they are to be found.”

“Pretty soon, I can tell you, there are going to be an awful lot of Eskimos racing round the Alaskan tundra in Range Rovers,” he wept joyfully, as a fellow convert sent word to his Kenyan subsidiary that, from now on, its African workforce would be permitted to gorge themselves every day on coffee beans. “Now, is there a groovy chick here who would like to barter me some henna in exchange for my pointless gold cufflinks? I’ve always harboured a secret yearning for a magnificent mane of bright red dreadlocks.”

Meanwhile, all over the world’s oceans, the crews of tankers, bulk carriers and containers ships were taking to the lifeboats, as instructed by their reformed shipowners, and learning to fish for only their own immediate needs after opening the sea cocks on the hated vessels which have senselessly squandered the world’s dwindling oil supplies hauling goods needlessly from continent to continent.

“Of course, without international trade there will be a billion or so deaths over the course of the next few months,” smiled Bank of England governor Mervyn King, sporting a splendid new set of tribal tattoos on his eyelids as he danced ecstatically around a bonfire of now-obsolete futures and share certificates. “But I know they will pass into the next world happy in the knowledge that the good earth will be fertilised by their cast-off mortal shells, ensuring a fantastic crop of turnips for the survivors to venerate.”