Neo-liberals or Neo-Vandals?

Well, perhaps there is no ideological master plan behind the coalition's policies. Perhaps they simply don't know what else to do other than be seen to implement savage cuts because that is what the new "gods" of the rating agencies and markets want to see happening! The effects will be much the same. In my first article of the WTF Religious Futures Network nearly two years ago (Authoritarian Capitalism), I suggested that what we would see would be a rationing of access to the goods of global capitalism. This morning we are being told that universities need to charge higher fees and to teach more cost effectively. In other words, a university education will be rationed to those who can afford it. Maybe those at the lower end of the earnings scale will be protected as public services are cut, but then those in the middle range will be expected to pay for themselves or to lose out. Now there undoubtedly have been some silly and unjustified areas of public expenditure - for instance on consultants and other "jobs for the boys" - but are we being offered any rationale for how and where cuts will now be made? Is this cutting for the sake of cutting?
I have a number of questions about this.
We are no longer a manufacturing nation - that base was eroded in the 1970s and 1980s and has not been reversed. So where do new jobs come from? Leisure and the public sector. Take jobs out of the public sector and unemployment could well hit the numbers predicted by the CIPD today. Growth relies on export markets in China - what if this doesn't happen?
Is the sovereign debt situation in the UK as bad as is being portrayed? Reading recent blogs of Robert Peston and Stephanie Flanders of the BBC apparently not. In which case, why the current scaremongering?
What will be left once these cuts have bitten into our education sector that will create a base for future innovation and investment? Just which are the "luxuries that we can no longer afford", or which only the wealthy can afford?
It is all very well to state that "we" are going to be consulted on this, but no consensus would emerge and is this anything more than a PR exercise or desperate attempt to convince "us" that we have taken responsibility for the direction of our own demise?
So, are we being governed by neo-liberals or neo-vandals?