LORD OWEN has donated his political papers about Polaris, nuclear weapons and the Cold War debate to Liverpool University’s archives.

These are being fashioned into a book, Nuclear Papers, by Liverpool University Press.

They draw lessons which give an insight into what still goes on today, he claims.

“The question is how we should replace the Trident deterrent. I think we should with a simpler system.”

He wants to show the debate in PM James Callaghan’s Labour government, when, as Dr David Owen MP, he was Foreign Secretary, in the late 1970s.

“It will relate to the decisions which any new UK government will have to make,” he says.

“It’s eerie how many of the issues are the same, the undue secrecy, the cost escalation, budget cuts and options.

“Time and again, history can teach us about the present.”

He is opening his archive in September and introducing his own 15-year rule on his papers.

Some 25 boxes recently arrived from his time as Labour Party Foreign Secretary. Already here are his papers dealing with his chairmanship of the EU Conference of the former Yugoslavia.

A revised edition of his memoirs, called Time to Declare – Second Innings is imminent.

He was much in the public eye as a co-founder of the Social Democratic Party in 1981, pictured left, which broke away from an increasingly left-wing Labour Party.

Liverpool’s problems also had national media attention.

“When I was leader of the SDP, I made speeches about Liverpool and how to overcome some of those problems,” he says.

“Coming to Liverpool took me out of London. I’m not a metropolitan figure, but I hadn’t my Plymouth constituency dragging me to the West Country, and I needed somewhere else.”