Class act: The working-class game binding London and Canberra

CANBERRA — When a new British prime minister speaks to their Australian counterpart for the first time, it’s a reset of Australia’s oldest and deepest relationship. The agenda seems obvious: Intelligence sharing. Tariffs. Hot war and simmering conflict. If the conversation turns to sport, cricket has often been the obvious choice. But as Andy Burnham began his introductory calls to world leaders, he and Anthony Albanese got to rugby league. On their July 23 leader-to-leader call, the two men talked animatedly about the sport they have each spent a lifetime inside. Albanese told Burnham he would love to see the Kangaroos, the Australian national side, tour the United Kingdom soon. “I used to love watching the old Kangaroo Tours to the U.K.,” Albanese told POLITICO, reminiscing about “Mal Meninga’s try at Old Trafford in the green and gold” in 1990, in Burnham’s home town of Manchester, one of “those small grounds where the fans are right there on the tiny dead ball lines.” By the end of the call, according to Burnham’s office, he agreed to support Albanese’s team, the South Sydney Rabbitohs. “I’m happy to barrack for Prime Minister Burnham’s Leopards in return,” Albanese said. It wasn’t just small talk. The AUKUS military alliance requires London and Canberra to operate at a level of trust that treaties and memorandums can’t manufacture. Delivering nuclear-powered submarines to Australia to ward off Chinese aggression will take decades of shared industrial secrets, shipyard schedules and nuclear technology. Personal chemistry between leaders is not a substitute for institutional machinery, but it is the lubricant. Burnham and Albanese have a shared, unfakeable claim to a working-class sport at exactly the moment both left-wing leaders are trying to hold onto working-class voters in the face of a right-wing populist challenge. Burnham told POLITICO that deep love of the sport is “one of the many reasons the friendship between our two countries runs as deep as it does.” “In the North of England, rugby league is in our blood. It is played and watched week in, week out, rain or shine, and I know that is a feeling shared in communities right across Australia too,” he said. The code of collective action Burnham’s urgent political mission is to stem the flow of working-class voters who have switched from Labour to Nigel Farage’s hard-right Reform UK, in many post-industrial Northern towns of Lancashire and Yorkshire, and nearby Cumbria and Cheshire, where rugby league is played. Reconnecting with these communities is critical for Burnham’s hopes of saving Labour from defeat at the next U.K. general election, which is not due until 2029 but could potentially come sooner. And the culture of rugby league is one that aligns closely with Labour’s left-wing history and its mission in these very same parts of the country: The sport only exists because of a fight about money and class In 1895, clubs in the north of England broke from Rugby Union over the refusal of the sport’s authorities to compensate players for wages lost to injury or time away from work. Wealthy players didn’t need the support, while working-class players decided their only option was to quit, and set up a rival code that allowed them to receive a wage for their efforts. Players in Australia — formed out of British colonies and still firmly in the British Empire — soon followed suit, and the split never healed. Neither did the class coding. Union, which was devised in a historic, prestigious private school, remains a fixture of British and Australian fee-paying schools. Australia’s opposition leader, Angus Taylor, a Rhodes Scholar and former McKinsey consultant, plays Rugby Union. Albanese, who grew up with a single mother in social housing, played league. Burnham’s Northern assets League “has a very particular culture,” said Tony Collins, emeritus professor of history at De Montfort University and the author of several books on the sport. It understands itself, he said,