John Healey’s aim in his first budget was to ease a little pressure on British households while avoiding spooking the markets, the chancellor of the exchequer appears to have just about pulled it off.

A voter-friendly refund of £100 ($133) in energy costs for most homes will be paid for by a theoretically temporary increase in bank taxes. The likes of JPMorgan Chase & Co. are duty bound to moan about that, but bond traders didn’t seem too troubled. Yields on 10-year Gilts, a proxy for UK borrowing costs, were down a bit on Wednesday.

Still, a welter of small-scale measures — no matter how popular and cleverly targeted — only get you so far. We’re left waiting for the details on Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s grander designs for Britain: Whither his promise to upend four decades of neoliberalism and his ambition to rewire the state?

Indeed, this was so much of a continuity budget that it might have been delivered by Healey’s oft-derided predecessor Rachel Reeves. While she and the then PM, Keir Starmer, were hapless politically, her economic legacy could have been a lot worse.

What’s different this year is that Labour has a prime minister and chancellor who understand optics and managing expectations. Healey avoided repeating Reeve’s torturous lead-up to the 2025 budget, where she let speculation run that she would break a manifesto pledge by raising income tax. And then, as financial markets got used to what would have been the simplest way to raise UK revenue, she lost her nerve.

Kemi Badenoch, leader of the opposition, made mincemeat of her. Reeves never recovered from the experience, and Badenoch started to haul the Tories back from the brink. Against Healey, the admirably punchy Badenoch failed to land any serious blows. Healey and Burnham are cannier, more seasoned adversaries.

There’s a sure-footedness, too, in how they’re kicking the big fiscal problems — how to pay for defense and cut welfare — down the road to a spring spending review. They can’t play this game forever, of course, but why not secure political breathing space if you can? No. 10 and No. 11’s joint management of the opinion polls and bond markets has been effective, so far.

And it would be a mistake to think that Burnham is sacrificing at the altar of pragmatism his somewhat misty-eyed vision of transforming the lives of ordinary Britons. Appointing the steady, low-key Healey ahead of the greener and more left-wing Ed Miliband was Burnham’s attempt to neutralize the economy and Gilt yields as serious weaknesses for Labour.

If we’re being generous, perhaps this was what he meant when saying a government shouldn’t be in hock to bond traders. In Healey, he has a chancellor who seems able to lower the temperature, even at a time when Treasury bean counters are constantly having to reassess the economic damage of Donald Trump’s pointless war on Iran. When Healey quit as Starmer’s defense secretary in protest over military spending, it was a mortal blow to the PM precisely because he’s such a drama-free loyalist.

Burnham will wager that these characteristics give him cover to pursue more radical policies, and manage the left of his party, without freaking out the markets. But the bigger question, both for the seemingly fiscal realist Healey and anyone who wants the UK to thrive, is whether the sunny man-of-the-people Burnham will give his chancellor the cover to tackle Britain’s crippling welfare bill. Hearteningly, apart from a few diehards, Labour lawmakers are becoming more realistic about the need for cuts so long as they come with support for getting people back into work.

Burnham and Healey are certainly close, sharing a weekly curry in the flat above No. 11, where the chancellor lives. Both hail from lower-middle-class families and won places at Cambridge before coming of age politically in Tony Blair’s New Labour era in the late ‘90s. But the PM’s garrulous personality and tendency to overshare is in stark contrast to the careful chancellor, who is unfailingly polite and exacting to work for.

Like Burnham, Healey is tricky to pin down politically, and the hope for the UK is that will give them the flexibility to address its chronic problems, even if their first budget merely nibbles at the edges. While Healey has been pegged as broadly on the “soft left,” it’s hard to imagine a true lefty boasting as he did in his budget speech of having a son who had served as an army reservist.

The military question looms large over the British government today, as it does over most Western nations. The risk is that a US president chastened by midterm defeat next week will reignite the conflict in Iran, again forcing up the cost of energy and making Healey and Burnham’s economic planning ever more fraught. Then there’s Trump's emboldening of Vladimir Putin, the reason why the UK and others must find the money to rearm rapidly.

There’s not much Burnham or Healey can do to control a wayward White House. And in the realm they do control, they seem to be getting much of the politics right. Nonetheless, they do still need to shift more of the onus from welfare to defense, and to giving the nation an economy dynamic enough to survive in an increasingly hostile world. Dealing with that reality is a job they’ve barely started.