Having established the domestic policies that were to be transmitted into the realm of international development, Gordon Brown set about putting in place the institutional arrangements that would be crucial to meet New Labour's commitment to eliminate world poverty. Despite its recent incarnation, Brown clearly felt that it was not enough for the Department for International Development (DFID) to simply roll out these policies. His vision was much bigger than that, and the Chancellor set about forging links with a number of key international financial institutions (IFIs) in order to build what Brown himself termed a ‘new Jerusalem’. Invoking the biblical imagery found in the Book of Revelation, for Brown, this ‘new Jerusalem’ represented a ‘new world’, one free from poverty, debt and disease.

This ‘new Jerusalem’ was to be built upon the same ‘building blocks of prosperity’ that Gordon Brown had put in place in Britain; building blocks of stability and ‘sound’ policies that would, according to Brown, enable developed and developing nations alike to realise the opportunities of globalisation and deliver global prosperity for all. Embedding his vision into the orthodoxy of the ‘post-Washington Consensus’, Brown took his blueprint to a galaxy of international institutions of economic governance abroad. This would ensure that there was not only a clear transmission of policy but also a distinct institutional transmission from the domestic to global spheres of economic governance. This policy and institutional transmission between the domestic and international levels would lock in the Chancellor's ‘new economic architecture’ and provide the basis for the specific policies explored in the following three chapters.

This institutional transmission is striking for it represented a clear departure from the criticism expressed by ‘old’ Labour concerning the ‘free-market’ monetarist policies constituted in the original ‘Washington Consensus’ and pursued by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and other IFIs. As the party began the long road back to power at the start of the 1980s, Labour warned that these policies could ‘inflict economic damage of such severity as to cause the destruction of democratic governments’.