GOOD news - the war is over. No, not the war in Afghanistan, we'll be there for years. I'm talking about the War on the Motorist, a loosely-defined conflict that involves uncaring ministers being beastly to innocent drivers with pricier petrol, rising vehicle tax and speed cameras.

The coalition government - in the form of Eric Pickles, the omnipresent communities minister, and Philip Hammond, his colleague at the Department for Transport - yesterday announced that they would scrap planning guidance that restricted the number of parking spaces that housebuilders could provide for new homes, as well as removing a requirement for councils to use high parking charges to discourage driving. Sayeth Mr Pickles:

Whitehall's ­addiction to micromanagement has created a parking nightmare with stressed-out drivers running a gauntlet of unfair fines, soaring charges and a total lack of residential parking. The result is our pavements and verges crammed with cars on kerbs endangering drivers, cyclists and pedestrians, increased public resentment of overzealous parking wardens and escalating charges and fines. Today the Government is calling off Whitehall's war on the motorist by scrapping the national policy restricting ­residential parking spaces and instructing councils to push up charges

The Tories have long cherished their reputation as the party of the motorist, and this will doubtless go down well with the party's base. Indeed the promise to end the 'war' was a recurring feature of their election campaign. It plays well with the narrative that motorists are treated as cash-cows by uncaring bureaucrats, a political trope that, after years of reptition, almost everyone now believes.

But look a little closer and the holes begin to appear. Despite Mr Pickles' pronouncement, local councils - which are facing huge cuts in their central-government handouts - are going to be sorely tempted to keep parking charges high (and perhaps even to raise them) in order to replace some of their lost central-government cash. And the announcement came on the same day as the coalition's 2.5-percentage-point hike in VAT, which, along with a separate rise in fuel tax, conspired to add around 3p per litre to the cost of British petrol, already among the most expensive in the world. Am I accusing the government of trying to deflect attention from an unpopular price hike by loudly and conspicuously pandering to tabloid headline writers? Perish the thought.

Leaving aside the nitty gritty of the government's prestidigitations, there is the broader point that the idea of a "war on the motorist" is, to put it politely, bunk.

One of my favourite charts (from the DfT's annual Transport Trends report) is reproduced below. It shows the cost, in real terms, of various forms of transport over the past twenty years, and also the real increase in GDP over the same period. Every kind of public transport is now more expensive than it was two decades ago, although GDP has risen faster still. The cost of running a car has risen too, and is now about 20% higher than it was when Tony Blair came to office in 1997. Some of that reflects deliberate policy choices, such as higher taxes on polluting cars and continuing increases in petrol tax. Some of it reflects the rising price of oil, about which no British government can do anything at all. And in any case, it has risen no faster than GDP, meaning that, on average, running a car today takes no more of one's income than it did in 1997. But the increase in running costs has been put in the shade by the precipitous fall in the cost of buying a car over the same period. The result is that the total cost of motoring - shown by the red line - is now only around 85% of its 1997 level.

There are other holes in Messrs Pickles and Hammond's tale. Vehicle running costs abruptly reversed course during the year 2000, which (not coincidentally) was the year that Labour caved in to protests about the price of fuel and scrapped the fuel-duty "escalator", a policy of above-inflation rises in petrol duty that was brought in by - whisper it - the Conservatives. It took until 2007 for costs to reach their 2000 levels again. To slightly misquote another, more famous, Tory politician, you could make a pretty strong case that the motorist has never had it so good.