I spent an evening with two Mori pollsters in a poor neighbourhood of Mexico City - homeless kids, women washing laundry in sewers, men living in homes made of car parts and corrugated tin.The Mori pollsters were not there to interview the abject poor, however. They had gathered six women from Mexico's proper working class to discuss the peso crisis. We sat in a dingy, low-ceilinged room with a crucifix on the wall. The women had all clawed their way up from jobs like cleaning floors to jobs like taking tickets in a bus station. The two countries called for a tweaking of the international financial regime.

Together, they proposed Third Way thinking for the future bailouts of countries like Brazil. In such bailouts, according to the new formula, the tough conditions attached to IMF loans will be partly offset by World Bank "social spending".The trouble with the Government's strategy is that it makes the UK a cheerleader for Clintonomics. But Clintonomics is in large part what got us into the present mess.Washington is making vigorous efforts to dig itself out of the mess now But the situation is unbelievably complex. Gordon Brown has spent his entire working life championing Labour, and who does he end up sounding like?A banker. Last week Mr Brown divided his efforts between working on a "21st century architecture" for inter- national finance and counting the pennies in his budget to show that the Third Way can survive a serious recession."Senior ministerial sources" said last week that the Chancellor would use reserves set aside for a rainy day, amounting to pounds 30bn over the next three years. These reserves, the sources explained, would make up for the tax income the Goverment expects to lose now that the Chancellor says the economy will grow about 1 per cent in 1999, not 2 per cent as previously forecast.No doubt the arithmetic adds up Still, it remains mumbo-jumbo.

Economic forecasts are no more than extrapolations of past trends. But the world crisis has created the biggest break in economic trend lines since the Second World War.Mr Brown made the customary excuse: "Slower world growth makes it inevitable that growth in Britain next year will be more moderate."The question is, what is Mr Brown going to do in the face of this "slower world growth"? His strategy seems to be to wait and see how the crisis beds down - wait and see, in other words, how bad it gets. Meanwhile, in Washington last week, he strengthened the already strong ties between the UK and US governments As a team, the UK and US pressed for interest rate cuts. IF IT weren't so serious it would be funny. Here we have the worst world economic crisis in 50 years and what does the Prime Minister do in response? He grabs the handbag of one of the crisis's master architects, Lady Thatcher, gets up on her high heels, and mimics her Listen to Mr Blair: "There is no alternative ...