As Dave Hill reports, Conservative Assembly member Roger Evans has blogged about this week’s PQT in Brixton. Information flowed thick and fast from Brixton on the night via Twitter, including informative tweets by the Liberal Democrat head of office at City Hall Nick Carthew.

In answer to the question “Do you support the removal of the Western Extension?”, 66 per cent responded “no” and 34 per cent responded “yes”. Roger Evans concludes that “as the WEZ doesn’t cover Brixton, all this really demonstrated was that people support taxes as long as someone else is paying them – twelve years of New Labour were based on that premise.”

It is true that the population as a whole may take a broader view than those closest.  Smokers are probably more opposed to high taxes on cigarettes than the population as a whole but that does not stop the general population being right.

But, still, I’m not so sure that it can be explained purely in this way. It is in no way a scientific survey, but 66 per cent is nonetheless quite a high level of support for the western extension. The attitudinal survey [pdf] carried out for Transport for London – based on a representative sample of Londoners – showed thirty per cent of people wanted to keep it as it is, fifteen per cent want to change it, and forty-one per cent wanted to remove it. (That meant that more people - forty-five percent – wanted to keep it in some form rather than get rid of it, by the way).

The even larger margin in favour of the retention of the western part of the zone may simply be that it was an audience which for some reason was more strongly in favour of congestion charging than usual. Alternatively, and this is something that many in City Hall may be wondering about generally, it is not inconceivable that we will see a strengthening of opposition to the removal of the western extension as we get closer to its abolition and alongside the high annual fare increases. If Londoners see that their fares are rising way above inflation but £50m-70million in revenue is being cut out of the TfL budget to protect car drivers in the city’s centre then this might not prove very popular. Particularly as other measures, like the CO2 charge on gas guzzlers, have also been cut, leading to further lost revenue.

For a start, cutting out this revenue blows a big hole in the mayor’s office usual fallback position of blaming Ken Livingstone. If you whack up fares but take money out of the budget yourself then you weaken your ability to blame someone else.

The PQT vote may be a rough and ready early sign of that. We’ll see.