Greenpeace sends message to UK's PM

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LONDON (Reuters) - Five fit environmental protestors climbed one of Britain's biggest chimneys on Monday to send a message to UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown but only managed to daub his first name on the stack before being ordered down.

Greenpeace campaigners stopped the conveyor belts feeding coal into the Kingsnorth power plant in Kent on Monday in an attempt to shut the power station, while a handful of others set off up the ladder scaling the power station's 200-metre chimney to paint "Gordon Bin It" as they abseiled down.

LONDON (Reuters) - Five fit environmental protestors climbed one of Britain's biggest chimneys on Monday to send a message to UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown but only managed to daub his first name on the stack before being ordered down.

Greenpeace campaigners stopped the conveyor belts feeding coal into the Kingsnorth power plant in Kent on Monday in an attempt to shut the power station, while a handful of others set off up the ladder scaling the power station's 200-metre chimney to paint "Gordon Bin It" as they abseiled down.

But a court injunction by plant owner E.ON UK cut short the campaigners' call for Brown to bin the company's proposal to build another coal-fired plant at the site, which if approved would be the first new UK coal plant in decades.

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"We had a gentlemen's agreement with Greenpeace that they could stay up the chimney because its a long way down and doing it in the middle of the night isn't ideal," a spokesman for E.ON said. "They are on the way down as we speak... They did 'Gordon' but that's it."

Although the protest did not succeed in shutting down the plant, three of the four 485-megawatt generation units did slash their output to 230 MW on Monday afternoon, but had returned to near full output by early on Tuesday, according to data from National Grid.