The audience watches as a disabled man is being given a Work Capability Assessment in a Newcastle Jobcentre.

He is the eponymous character in I, Daniel Blake, the latest film by Left-wing director Ken Loach. Needless to say, his experience is portrayed as brutal and degrading.

To make matters worse, the ‘healthcare professional’ who cross-examines Daniel is an employee of — you guessed it — an American private company.

I, Daniel Blake stars Dave Johns (right) as Daniel, a disabled man, and Hayley Squires (left) as single mum Katie

Typical Tories, eh? Not only do they force the disabled to go through a humiliating test to see if they’re fit for work, they outsource the administration of it to an evil capitalist corporation!

You may find it hard to believe, but that opening scene is the most entertaining in this relentlessly dour film. Daniel makes light of some of the questions, such as whether he has difficulty evacuating his bowels.

Compared with what follows, the first five minutes are almost upbeat.

The remaining 135 minutes are unremittingly depressing.

Daniel’s application for Employment and Support Allowance is declined, in spite of the fact he’s just had a heart attack, and he’s then thrown into the Kafkaesque labyrinth that is the welfare system appeals process.

Inevitably, the Left-wing Press has taken the film to its heart. The Guardian, for example, calls it a ‘battle cry for the dispossessed’, and its reviewer describes how he was reduced to ‘a shivering wreck . . . awash with tears, aghast with anger’.

Veteran socialist Loach also throws in a female character — a single mum called Katie — whom Daniel befriends when he witnesses her being mistreated at the same Jobcentre.

Veteran socialist Ken Loach (pictured, receiving the Palme d'Or) made the TV play Cathy Come Home, 50 years ago, about homelessness

She’s been turfed out of a homeless shelter in London — ‘They’re moving out the likes of me,’ she tells him — and ends up in a freezing flat in Newcastle with no electricity.

She faints from hunger in a food bank, is caught shoplifting sanitary towels and becomes a prostitute so she can buy school shoes for her daughter.

Such is Loach’s view of life for people trying to claim benefits in austerity Britain.

I, Daniel Blake is supposed to be a contemporary version of Cathy Come Home, the famous BBC film that Loach made in 1966 and which caused such an uproar at the time it led to changes in attitudes and, ultimately, changes in the law.

Will the latest effort of this 80-year-old Jeremy Corbyn supporter have a similar impact?

I’m no expert on the welfare system, but several aspects of I, Daniel Blake don’t ring true.

The two protagonists are a far cry from the scroungers on Channel 4’s Benefits Street, who I accept aren’t representative of all welfare recipients.

But Loach has erred in the opposite direction. For a filmmaker who styles himself a ‘social realist’, he has an absurdly romantic view of benefit claimants.

Daniel is a model citizen. At no point do we see him drinking, smoking, gambling, or even watching television. No, he is a welfare claimant as imagined by a member of the upper-middle class metropolitan elite.

He listens to Radio 4, likes classical music and makes wooden toys for children — the kind of over-priced ‘artisanal’ tat sold in ‘alternative’ toyshops in Islington, where Loach lives.

Katie, too, is a far cry from White Dee, the irresponsible character in Benefits Street.

She’s determined to better herself and has embarked on an Open University course.

If only those heartless Tories hadn’t thrown her out of London, where her mother helped with childcare, she might have become a social worker.

Perhaps even an organiser for the Islington branch of Momentum, the Corbyn-supporting phalanx of hard-Left Labour activists.

As it is, poor Katie is reduced to trying to read by candlelight, as her wan-faced children fight over the last digestive biscuit.

She is more like a Dickens character than a resident of 21st-century Britain, the fourth richest country in the world.

Daniel’s experience of trying to claim Employment and Support Allowance is also a little implausible.

Why are there no characters like Deirdre Kelly, aka White Dee, in Ken Loach films?

Would a middle-aged man who’s just had a massive heart attack really be declared ‘fit for work’ by the Department for Work and Pensions? Or is it the fault of the evil American corporation that conducts the tests for a multi-million-pound contract?

Even supposing this happened, it is dishonest to suggest, as the film does, that Daniel couldn’t appeal until a so-called ‘decision-maker’ had called him.

Employment and Support Allowance claimants are entitled to appeal as soon as they get the letter telling them their application has been turned down.

More importantly, the whole polemical thrust of the film is misleading.

We’re asked to believe people who claim incapacity benefit are all upstanding citizens who would love nothing more than to earn an honest living if only they were able-bodied. Forcing them to undergo a Work Capability Assessment is a needless humiliation from a sadistic Tory government.

In fact, after the test was introduced, 265,000 existing claimants and nearly a million new applicants were found fit for work.

No doubt Loach believes they all suddenly got better overnight. I dare say some were men like Daniel Blake who were wrongly assessed. But that still leaves many tens of thousands who should never have been receiving disability benefit.

They were among the huge number who became welfare-dependent under the last Labour government which saw Britain’s benefits bill rise by 50% despite record economic growth and falling unemployment.

Is Ken Loach really telling us all the new claimants were genuinely disabled, like Daniel Blake, and are being cheated of their benefits by evil Tories?

What about poor Katie? Is it likely she’d be reduced to selling her body to buy her daughter a new pair of school shoes?

Hardly. A single mother with two children typically gets more than £200 a week in state hand-outs and her rent would normally be covered by housing benefit. School shoes from Tesco cost around £10.

In the film, the working people of Newcastle are portrayed as kind-hearted Labour voters who support Daniel and Katie every step of the way. But welfare cuts introduced by the Coalition government were wildly popular with the majority of the British public.

A Populus poll in 2015, on the eve of the last General Election, found that only 25 per cent of the public share Loach’s view that abuse of the benefit system has been overstated.

By contrast, 75 per cent think too much money is being spent on benefits and want further cuts to Britain’s welfare bill.

And it may break Loach’s heart to learn that working class voters in the North of England are just as keen on cutting welfare as Conservatives in the South.

Indeed, Corbyn’s opposition to cutting the benefits bill is one reason his party is trailing Theresa May’s by 18 points.

Perhaps I’m missing the point of I, Daniel Blake. Maybe it’s not supposed to be a realistic portrait of what life is like for people at the bottom of society. Maybe it is just intended to signal to all Loach’s admirers what a compassionate fellow he is.

If so, it should be judged a success. It won the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival because of movie industry bigwigs keen to let the world know how virtuous they are, too, and no doubt will be showered with Baftas in due course.

At the end of the film, Daniel’s appeal hearing has arrived and he has prepared a ‘moving’ statement in which he complains about his terrible treatment at the hands of the Tory Government: ‘I’m not a client, or a customer, or a service user. I, Daniel Blake am a citizen, nothing more and nothing less.’

Unfortunately, tragedy strikes for Daniel.

Loach’s indictment of Tory Britain certainly packs a punch if you can make it to the end of his 140-minute civics lesson.