Brown says sorry, nearly

The Prime Minister has admitted he should have taken tougher action ten years ago to prevent the current financial crisis. Gordon Brown, who at the time was Chancellor of the Exchequer, says he wishes he had pushed for international reform in the aftermath of the Asian markets crisis in the late 1990s. In an interview, the PM said: "I take full responsibility for all my actions, but I think we're dealing with a bigger problem that is global in nature, as well as national. "Perhaps ten years ago after the Asian crisis when other countries thought these problems would go away, we should have been tougher ... keeping and forcing these issues on to the agenda like we did on debt relief and other issues of international policy." His comments stop far short of the full apology that his critics have been demanding but are the closest he has come to accepting a measure of responsibility for the current economic woes. Last week, Conservative party leader David Cameron said "sorry" for his party's failure to foresee the looming banking crisis. The move was seen as an attempt to increase the pressure on Mr Brown to offer a similar apology. Mr Brown also reportedly refused to rule out a further "fiscal stimulus" for the UK economy when Chancellor Alistair Darling delivers his Budget on April 22. A planned spending review is also unlikely to go ahead, in part because the economic outlook is so unstable it is difficult for ministers to make meaningful three-year departmental spending forecasts. Mr Brown said the "40-year-old prevalent orthodoxy" known as the "Washington consensus" in favour of free markets has come to an end. He continued: "Laissez-faire has had its day. People on the centre-left and the progressive agenda should be confident enough to say that the old idea that the markets were efficient and could work things out by themselves are gone. "That doesn't mean to say that what government does is always right. What it means is that both government and markets have got to be underpinned by values." Mr Brown insisted the current situation should favour Labour - despite the Tories' continuing double-digit lead in the opinion polls - as "only progressive, centre-left governments can address the problems of the global change".

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ITN | March 17, 2009

Tags:. .unstable. .fiscal. .tougher. .outlook. .woes