LONDON, March 17 (Reuters) - British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, lagging in opinion polls, said on Tuesday he wished he had done more to impose better regulation earlier and took full responsibility for his role in the economic crisis.
In an interview with the Guardian newspaper, the former finance minister also said he could not rule out further economic stimulus in April and said the pure free market era was over.
Brown's Labour Party is trailing the opposition Conservatives in most opinion polls and the Prime Minister has come under fire in recent weeks from opposition politicians who want him to apologise for not seeing the economic downturn earlier.
"I take full responsibility for all my actions," he said, in what the paper described as his fullest defence of his role in the recession and failure to apologise for it.
"But I think we're dealing with a bigger problem that is global in nature, as well as national," he told the newspaper, under the headline 'I should have done more to prevent bank crisis'.
"Perhaps 10 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."
The Bank of England has cut interest rates and the government launched a host of policies to boost the economy but Brown is still expected to lose the next election, due by mid-2010, according to analysts.
In what the Guardian described as a bid to launch a political fightback, Brown also said it was "essential for the sake of the country" that Labour wins a fourth term in power.
He said the 40-year old prevalent orthodoxy known as the Washington consensus in favour of free markets had come to an end.
"Laissez-faire has had its day," he said. "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." (Reporting by Kate Holton; Editing by Jan Dahinten)