UK politics: Tactics used by P&O to sack 800 crew ‘completely unacceptable’, says No 10 – as it happened

Former P&O staff and RMT members block the road leading to the Port of Dover as P&O Ferries suspended sailings and handed 800 seafarers immediate severance notices Photograph: Gareth Fuller/PA

5.32pm GMT

Afternoon summary

• P&O Ferries has been strongly condemned by MPs from all parties for the way it sacked 800 workers today without notice. In an emergency Commons statement, Robert Courts, the transport minister, said the tactics were “completely unacceptable”. Asked when the government was first told what the company was planning, he said “yesterday evening”. His Labour shadow, Louise Haigh, said the company’s behaviour was “beneath contempt – the action of thugs”. (See 5.11pm.)

• At least 20 Conservative MPs lobbied a committee investigating new rules on second jobs and their behaviour in the Commons chamber, with many saying they strongly disagreed with time limits on outside work.

• The equalities minister, Kemi Badenoch, has strongly condemned the strip-searching of a 15-year-old black girl in a London school, but said the public backlash against the incident shows the UK is “a country that cares about ethnic minorities”.

• Campaigners pushing for the release of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe were told by the Foreign Office not to make a “song and dance” about her plight, according to her MP, Tulip Siddiq.

5.28pm GMT

Labour’s Barry Gardiner says P&O have a £146m deficit in their pension fund. Yet their parent company spent £147m sponsoring a golf tournament, he says. He says the company has been treating the government like fools.

Courts says he agrees with the general point he is making about how the company has behaved.

Updated at 5.32pm GMT