I didn't know Ralph Miliband, although I knew many who did. But I did know Lou Kenton, of the same generation, also a Jewish Marxist, who distinguished himself as a volunteer ambulance driver with the International Brigades in Spain and doing successful battle with Oswald Mosley's Blackshirts in Cable Street in London's East End.

This was at a time when Viscount Rothermere's Daily Mail enthusiastically bellowed "Hurrah for the Blackshirts," while prominent members of the British Establishment, including from the Royal family, were busy appeasing the nazis and hunting wild boar with Herman Goering in the forests of East Prussia.

This was a time when the Midlands Industrial Council - full of Tory donors - enthused over Hitler's brave new world and the Duke of Windsor shook hands with the upstart German chancellor.

Lest it be forgotten, had Hitler's armies defeated Britain it was his intention to instate the quisling duke on the throne, which is why Winston Churchill had him bundled off to be governor of the Bahamas.

It is also the time that Miliband enlisted for the Royal Navy. Kenton would probably have done the same, except that the whaling ship he had been serving on had been torpedoed and he was invalided out.

For the past week the Daily Mail has sought to denigrate the good name of the late Miliband in time-honoured manner by accusing him of being unpatriotic and "hating Britain."

In doing so, it follows in the footsteps of former Daily Telegraph editor Charles Moore, who had voiced similar calumnies in the weeks that followed the death of Michael Foot.

Neither the Mail nor Moore, for all their certainty, appear to have much self-awareness.

Foot was the first - in Tribune - to warn that appeasement of nazi Germany would fail. He was also first to run the banner headline "Hitler means war!"

Foot was also first to report that nazi Germany was set to invade the Soviet Union.

When that indeed happened, in Operation Barbarossa, the same British Establishment which had set out to appease Hitler and allowed his armies to march into Vienna, the Sudetenland, Memel and Danzig, looked to the Red Army to open up a second front in the east.

Suddenly the Russians were our friend and allies, as they took the brunt of what Hitler could throw at them.

Lest it be forgotten, the Russians lost over 20 million people in what they called the "great patriotic war" and it was the Red Army which finally took "the lair of the fascist beast," Berlin, in April 1945.

Kenton would have been the first to volunteer that he was more "hand than brain" than Miliband.

But he shared the solidarity and internationalism that distinguished such a remarkable generation whose formative experiences in a country that had given them and their families refuge from persecution, gave them special reason to love the spirit and generosity of the people of these islands.

Again, sections of the British Establishment found it difficult to suppress a deep anti-semitism, even as ordinary people welcomed the "kinder-transport" of Jewish children out of nazi Germany and Austria.

I worked with Kenton when we raised funds for trees to be planted around the Czech village of Lidice, liquidated by the nazis, in reprisal for the assassination of one of the architects of the Holocaust, Reinhard Heydrich.

Kenton, like Miliband, never abandoned his Marxist beliefs.

Just because people like Miliband and Kenton had no time for the rotten British Establishment and thought - to coin a phrase - that Britain "could do better," it could not, in the wildest stretch of the fevered imagination of Paul Dacre, mean that they hated Britain.

But then the attack on Ralph Miliband is also linked to the Daily Mail's desire to stop Ed Miliband from becoming the next prime minister.

It is clearly determined to do to him what it did to Neil Kinnock. Except, on this occasion, the Labour leader has come out fighting and thrown the Mail on the defensive.

The paper did not expect this, and it does not quite know what to do. Clearly the current Lord Rothermere is less than happy at being reminded of his grandfather's fascist tendencies and would rather this row went away - along with, possibly, the current editor of the Daily Mail.

I suspect both Kenton and Miliband would regard the current deeply unpleasant background racket from the puerile right wing and a newspaper editor who should know better as time to - in the words of George Washington - "Guard against the imposture of pretended patriotism."