THE Bishop of Hereford has accused the Government of behaving like the Taliban over its plans to build a wind farm in unspoilt countryside.

Speaking in the House of Lords, the Rt. Rev. John Oliver likened the possible approval of 39 electricity generating turbines to the destruction of ancient Buddhist statues in Afghanistan.

"Yet that act was not wholly dissimilar to what has been going on for some time in some of our most beautiful landscapes, which form a part of our timeless heritage," said the Bishop, who is environment and rural issues spokesman for the Church of England.

"In the interests of narrow-minded, misguided, blinkered obsession with onshore wind generation - an environmental fig leaf to conceal the absence of any more rational and enlightened policies - we are in danger of ruining the remaining tracts of wild, beautiful upland country in mid-Wales - that great sweep of the Cambrian mountains from the southern fringes of Snowdonia to the Brecon Beacons."

A decision by Industry and Energy Minister Brian Wilson to approve a wind farm at Cefn Croes without a public inquiry could impact on similar shelved projects along the Herefordshire and Welsh border.

The debate heard how the Minister is minded to 'unlock' 100 wind farm projects that had been refused planning permission, including ones at Reeves Hill and the Black Mountains.

Bishop Oliver said: "I am resolutely opposed to the myopic, cynical, short-term reliance on the so-called proven technology of onshore wind, with its hideous despoliation of the landscape, its invasion by monstrous turbines of a totally alien industrial character, with their maddening noise and relentlessly disturbing movement."

He said the Cefn Croes project would produce a 'pitiful' .023 per cent of the UK's power generation.