Other commentators agreed that Liverpool's tactics had been successful: "The Times" printed a leader which began "Today in Liverpool municipal militancy is vindicated" and argued that the Government had subverted "its whole local government financial policy of the past four years; it issues an open invitation to councils to say the caps don't fit and they won't wear them". Within the Conservative government the political impact was immense. While the Government had not wanted to engage in a major fight in 1984 at the same time as the miners' strike, attitudes quickly hardened. Margaret Thatcher, in a lecture in November 1984 delivered a month after she survived an assassination attempt that killed five senior Conservatives, referred to a spectrum of groups undermining rule of law: "At one end of the spectrum are the terrorist gangs within our borders, and the terrorist states which finance and arm them. At the other are the Hard Left operating inside our system, conspiring to use union power and the apparatus of local government to break, defy and subvert the law."