ONLINE retailer Amazon continued to list clothes from a controversial US firm yesterday, despite a row over a misogynist T-shirt printed with the message: "Keep calm and rape a lot."

Yet, despite the tasteless messages, early on Saturday, thousands of T-shirts from the same company with slogans like "keep calm and hit her" were still available to buy online.

Among the 8425 T-shirts that were still being listed on Amazon at noon yesterday were those with messages such as "keep calm and knife her" and "keep calm and grope a lot".

An Amazon statement said later "those items are not available for sale".

Former deputy prime minister Lord Prescott took to Twitter to post: "First Amazon avoids paying UK tax. Now they're make money from domestic violence."

Columnist Caitlin Moran also tweeted: "Wow. Keep Calm & Hit Her T-shirts on Amazon. What a massive mellow-harsher."

The controversial T-shirts were based on the famous second world war propaganda slogan "keep calm and carry on".

The US company behind the T-shirts, Solid Gold Bomb, apologised and posted a statement on its website explaining how the T-shirts "had been automatically generated using a scripted computer process running against 100s of thousands of dictionary words".

It added: "Any offensive items that are remaining are certainly in the deletion queue and will be removed as soon as the processing is complete."