Gordon Brown today dismissed as "ridiculous" a claim from David Cameron that Britain's economic plight was so dire that the government could be forced to go to the IMF for a bail-out.

In an interview on BBC Radio 4's Today programme to coincide with the official confirmation today that Britain is in recession, the prime minister hit back at Cameron for suggesting that the government could have to make a humiliating appeal to the International Monetary Fund in the way that Labour did in the 1970s.

In a speech yesterday the Conservative leader said that the IMF option was a possibility because Britian was at risk of running out of money as a consequence of Brown's policies.

But Brown dismissed this idea strongly.

"I think this is ridiculous behaviour on behalf of opposition parties. The situation in Britain is this, that we have low public debt, that we have low inflation, wages are under control," he said.

Stressing that the recession was caused by international factors, the prime minister went on: "I do feel that it is only if you properly understand what the situation is, if I may say to our opponents, that you can actually deal with it."

Brown said that the government had taken action to stop the banks collapsing, to get more money to families and to get the banks lending again.

"We are fighting this recession with every weapon at our disposal. We are building the foundation stones of a recovery plan that is specifically designed to get Britain through these difficult times."

In his interview, Brown also:

• Insisted that the current recession was "a completely different kind of event" from previous recessions, because other British recessions were caused by domestic inflation whereas the current one was caused by a global banking crisis.

• Said that the length of the recession would "depend on the degree of international support" provided by other countries. The measures taken in Britain would have "twice the effect" if matched by similar fiscal stimulus packages elsewhere around the world.

• Played down suggestions that the bank rescue plan would place an unreasonable burden on the taxpayer, saying it involved "loans that have to be repaid" and "fees that are taken [by the government] for insurance services'.

• Dismissed the comment by Jim Rogers, the high-profile investor who this week urged people to sell sterling, saying: "If you think we are going to build our policy around the comments of a few speculators who want to make money out of Britain, you are very, very wrong indeed."

• Described the Financial Services Authority as "one of the best regulators in the world, not one of the worst".

• Repeatedly refused to admit that he was wrong when he said as chancellor that there would be no return to boom and bust. He said the current recession was caused by a global financial crisis and therefore "quite different from anything we have dealt with before".

During the interview Brown was asked if he accepted that he had made any mistakes during his time as chancellor. He said that his priority had been to get inflation down, and that this had been successful, but he acknowledged that he had not anticipated what might happen in the event of a "complete market failure" of the kind the world is experiencing now.

Brown repeatedly stressed that global factors, particularly the "lax standards that were allowed to develop in the United States of America [in the sub-prime market]" were to blame for the crisis.

He went on: "The lack of transparency in some of the non-banking institutions was such that no one could spot what was happening."

And he rejected the suggestion that he should have imposed tougher banking regulation in the UK. "For the last 10 years people have been telling me there's too much regulation, not too little."

Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, said that Brown was "living in denial" about the causes of the recession.

"In blaming everything on the US, Brown is desperately seeking to pull the wool over our eyes and distract attention from his own failure. For a decade he presided over an overheated housing market and a City of London gambling with the nation's future," Clegg said.

"The government must now urgently clear up the confusion over its bank bail-out plans. Gordon Brown must deliver big, permanent and fair tax cuts for people on low and middle incomes and use the money wasted on a pointless VAT cut on a huge green job creation scheme instead."

George Osborne, the shadow chancellor, told Sky News that today's growth figures showed that Britain was facing "the worst recession in a generation". He said that Brown's policies were failing.

"You do get the impression now that the government now does not really know what it is doing," Osborne said.

"What we need is some confidence that government policy is going to pull us through this. At the moment there's no public confidence, no international confidence. I think the public can now see that the government has achieved nothing."

Osborne also criticised the bank rescue plans announced this week, saying they contained "almost no detail".