People who complain about mass immigration are hypocrites if they enjoy eating chicken curry, a Tory MP has said.

Anna Soubry, who has emerged as a leading pro-EU rebel on the Conservative benches, said voters had been fooled by “myths” about the harm immigration does to them.

Speaking at a fringe event at the Conservative Party Conference, Ms Soubry suggested it was hypocritical for people to worry about mass immigration while enjoying foreign cuisine.

“Let’s get right down to this. There are conflations here between people who live in areas where they have hardly seen a black or brown face and hardly any EU migrants and those areas which have,” she said.

“Some of these people are the ones who say ‘I don’t like all that foreign muck, what are we having for tea tonight? Chicken tikka masala?’ — and then go off for an Italian, but then say: ‘We don’t want all these foreigners’.”

The Times reports that Ms Soubry, who was sacked as a minister when Theresa May took over as Prime Minister, launched into an impassioned defence of immigration, claiming she was not “patronising” poorer voters.

“We’ve now gone from one extreme where people couldn’t have a debate about immigration for fear of being called racist, and now you go to the other extreme where people like me want to make a positive case and actually take it on, and you say ‘Oh, you’re patronising poor people’.

“I’m trying to have an open and honest debate and that means you have to be honest about your emotions and take on the emotions of other people.”

In April, a leaked government report said that EU migration was having a “disproportionate impact” on Britain and damaging social cohesion with migrants from the political bloc account for 75 per cent of the growth in the UK’s employment figures, thus pushing out British workers.

Well-educated Eastern Europeans are particularly “over-represented in low-skilled sectors in the UK – in-work benefits can act as a subsidy for them to take and stay in these jobs, damaging UK social policy objectives”.

These Eastern Europeans, it is feared, are taking jobs from less well-educated Britons.