The Rawnsley family spent their most recent summer holiday travelling in the United States. It was terrifically good value, which is one of the reasons August already seems like such a very long time ago. Those were the happy days, the pre-crash days when a pound bought two dollars.

One of the highlights was the trip we took along the Blue Ridge Parkway, a fabulous road through the stunning scenery of the Appalachian mountains. Plunging ravines, glorious meadows, breathtaking mountaintops and wonderful waterfalls are all to be enjoyed. Running for 469 miles from Rockfish Gap in Virginia to Cherokee in North Carolina, it is the sort of drive about which songs are written.

Work on the scenic highway began in 1935 as part of the public works programme of Franklin D Roosevelt's New Deal. It did what it was designed to do, which was to generate jobs and draw visitors to one of the regions of the United States most devastated by the Great Depression. Here's the double beauty of it. This was a project to alleviate the economic distress of its own time which also bequeathed an achievement of enduring value to future generations. Some 20 million people visit the national park every year. The Blue Ridge Parkway is testimony to how crises can be turned into legacies by leaders with the requisite willpower, ingenuity and intelligence.

As the D-word again stalks the world, the current crisis will separate Prime Ministers and Presidents into two kinds of leaders. The unlucky countries will be those led by politicians who think only of how they might scrabble through the next six months. The lucky ones will be those with leaders who turn the emergency of the moment into an opportunity to equip their countries for the future.

When Gordon Brown and his fellow EU leaders met on Friday, they tried to make their agreement to a stimulus plan sound a lot bolder and more decisive than it really is. They wrote a cheque for €200bn but left it unsigned. It is entirely up to individual states whether they actually fund the plan.

That is a bit deflating of the Prime Minister's boast that the world is following his example. In a Freudian moment at the dispatch box last week, he even claimed to have saved the planet. Yet GB is not the role model for Barack Obama. The next American President prefers the example of FDR. The President-elect has just committed himself to a vast programme of public works as the centrepiece of his response to America's economic anguish. By contrast, Gordon Brown's answer to the recession has been focused on trying to prop up banks and prod consumers to keep shopping.

The risk of that approach was highlighted by the German Finance Minister, Peer Steinbrück, with his undiplomatic scorn that 'crass Keynesianism' may not do much to alleviate the recession but is guaranteed to leave Britain saddled with a national debt that 'will take a whole generation to pay off'.

His words have been gleefully seized on by David Cameron and George Osborne. Yet Herr Steinbrück's intervention also drew attention to their own failings. The most brutally succinct criticism of Mr Brown's approach to the crisis has come not from the leaders of Britain's Conservatives, but from a German social democrat.

He is wrong to suggest that nothing can be done to stimulate distressed economies. He's right when he points to the potential perils of throwing huge sums at consumers and failing companies with little guarantee that maxing out the nation's credit card will work.

The more I think about it, the more sure I become that there have to be smarter ways of using billions of pounds than encouraging people to go shopping for more foreign imports. If the government is going to spend like there is no tomorrow, better to use the money building things that might be useful when tomorrow comes. Better to invest in Britain. That way, when we do eventually emerge the other side of recession, we will be in a fitter place to exploit a resumption of growth. The case is even more compelling because this is a country crying out for serious investment to improve its creaking infrastructure.

There are plenty of needs to be met. Let me suggest three projects that would provide much better value for money than squittering away any more billions on electronic toys from the Far East. The first and most screamingly obvious candidate for investment is Britain's outdated railways. We are now in that dreadful season when a centimetre of snow is capable of paralysing our antediluvian rail network. It is as bewildering as it is shocking that our railways are so bad. Britain invented the train. We live in a compact, temperate and relatively flat country with no mountain ranges like the Alps or the Rockies to negotiate. Nature gifted us geography ideally suited for a fast, efficient and green rail network. We blew it. When one of his cabinet urged Tony Blair to take railways more seriously, the then Prime Minister fatalistically responded: 'There's no point. There's nothing that can be done.'

That attitude, shared by British politicians of every stripe for many decades, has left us with the most embarrassing railways in western Europe. France, Germany, Spain and Italy all have high-speed rail networks. The only high-speed link in Britain are the tracks that take you out of the country and through the Chunnel. We belatedly invested in that only because the French shamed us into it.

The government is humming and hawing about whether to commit to building a high-speed rail link connecting Heathrow, London, Birmingham, Manchester and Glasgow. If it makes the decision in the way that has been historically typical of British governments, it will spend half as much money as is required to do the job properly and it will take twice as long as it should. For around the same sum that the Treasury is throwing at consumers to spend on plasma screens made in China, Britain can have a high-speed rail link connecting its industrial spine.

For more immediate results, and for a pretty modest net cost, work could be begun quite quickly on the modernisation of the inter-city network. Smelly and expensive diesel trains still ply the Midland mainline and the Great Western mainline. For a fraction of the money which has been spent on a VAT cut of uncertain effect, those lines could be electrified.

A programme to modernise the railways will generate work for key industries such as construction, steel and engineering. It is a big job creator. It will have an excellent multiplier effect feeding the stimulus through to other industries. It will help move Britain away from its addiction to the car. It will lift the long-term growth potential of the economy. It is a no-brainer.

Modernising our antiquated railways is a catch-up project to haul Britain's transport system into the early 21st century. We will also need get-ahead projects which will equip the country for the rest of the century. My next candidate for investment is the creation of a national fibre optic network capable of connecting everyone to super-fast broadband. More and more economic, social and political activity is happening on the internet, but the digital plumbing is struggling to cope with the volumes of data. If you want to download a film, for most people that means leaving the computer running all night. This is because nearly all households and many businesses are still connected to the net by old-fashioned copper wiring. There's a big, essential and urgent job of work to do replacing the outdated wiring with fibre optics. This is another project which is too large for the private sector to take on by itself, especially during a recession. A fibre optic network would allow every firm and household to enjoy and exploit the potential of the broadband speeds currently available only in swanky offices. This is the sort of project that intelligent government would invest in.

My third candidate is green energy. We know this recession will end one day. The oil price is not going to be low for ever. To prepare for the day when it soars again, to make good on commitments to reduce carbon emissions and to be free of dependency on the likes of Russia and Saudi Arabia, we have to get much more ambitious about renewable energy. For a blowy country surrounded by sea, Britain has been pathetic at harnessing the energy of wind and wave. One pressing need is to start laying power lines which will allow the energy from wind and wave turbines in the North Sea to be plugged into the national grid. That will cost a fraction of the billions which have been committed to the feckless banks. Ministers should commit to that essential investment for a greener energy future.

A modernised rail system, a national fibre optic network and a renewable energy grid: all have the triple merit of generating business in Britain, creating jobs in Britain and enhancing Britain's competitiveness. They are not make-work schemes of the sort that can give infrastructure projects a bad name when money is spent building bridges to nowhere. All these projects meet a national need and will leave a profitable legacy.

Our politicians need to be thinking not just about how to get through the next six months, but how to make Britain fit for the world after the slump. If we are going to spend billions, better they are spent leaving future generations with a legacy which amounts to more than just a mountain of debt.

Cleverly done, big can be beautiful. If you remain to be convinced, let me recommend a drive down the Blue Ridge Parkway.