 Once Jeremy Hunt has finished waving through Rupert Murdoch's competition-shredding BSkyB takeover, our highly ambitious culture secretary should turn his attention to betting.  Betfair, a British success story which has grown from a standing start in 1999 to become one of the world's largest online sports betting providers, has become the latest in a stream of bookmakers to go offshore. The company, which takes six million bets a day, is getting a Gibraltar betting licence to avoid Britain's 15% tax on betting profits - a likely saving of ? 18.5m annually.  This is a classic tax dodge. Chief executive David Yu cheerfully admits that the company's 1,200 staff will stay in Britain: "We remain sitting in Hammersmith." Betfair will have a skeleton operation in Gibraltar, including a customer services department in miniature, to satisfy the Rock's regulatory rules. But the business will still be run from west London, Stevenage and Halifax. It will still pay corporation tax and payroll tax in Britain. But its betting tax will fall from 15% to 1%.  Yu argues that his company hasn't got much choice. Virtually all of its rivals, including Ladbrokes, William Hill and even the government-owned Tote, have shifted varying degrees of their internet operations offshore. Yu says Betfair has to compete on a level playing field (the same "everybody else is doing it" argument used by banks to justify seven-figure bonuses).  The Department for Culture, Media and Sport is in the middle of a review of remote gambling. The present situation is a dog's dinner. The government either needs to rethink the way it taxes betting or restrict the activities of those who don't pay dues here - by preventing offshore bookies from advertising to UK consumers. Sort it out, Mr Hunt.  Deep in the heart of Oklahoma, something is stirring in the sleepy prairie town of Cushing. a modest settlement of about 8,300 people, Cushing is the oil hub of north america. a handful of shops, barbecue restaurants and the Buckhorn Bar are dwarfed by hundreds of storage tanks capable of holding 45m barrels of oil.  Cushing, heavily defended by the US authorities as potential national security target, is the official delivery point for oil orders placed on Nymex, the commodities exchange. It is the junction at which pipelines running south from Canada's oil sands meet oil coming north from the Gulf of Mexico. and just at the moment, the town's oil tanks are 90% full - stocks stand at more than 40m barrels, a quantity of oil worth $4.6bn (? 2.9bn).  a high oil price - it is currently about $113 a barrel - mean furious activity in speculation, hedging - and storage in Cushing. The town enjoys a renaissance each time the price soars. But for the rest of the developed world, oil inflation means misery. Petrol prices in Britain hit ? 6 a gallon, or 132p a litre, last week, which, according to the aa's Edmund King, marks "the point at which the wheels start to come off mobility in 21st century Britain". Filling up a family car costs about ? 80 - a substantial chunk of the average gross weekly wage of ? 499. Supermarket chain Morrisons became the latest British business to squeal with pain last week, declaring that the fuel price has sapped consumers' spending power by ? 400m in a year.  The uprising in Libya, with fighting around the refinery in Ras Lanuf, has all but eliminated output from a nation with the world's ninth biggest oil reserves. With unrest rippling across the Middle East, Friday's "day of rage" in Saudi arabia unnerved traders. Elections are looming in Nigeria which, historically, have meant violent disruptions to that nation's oil output. and militants bombed a major oil pipeline in Iraq on Thursday.  as western economies stagger haphazardly towards a fragile recovery, this oil spike has come at a dismal moment. Nouriel Roubini, the endearingly pessimistic economist dubbed "Dr Doom", has suggested that a sustained oil price of $140 could push the US and European economies into a double-dip recession. In a more extreme scenario, a price of $200 could mean global economic growth grinding to a complete halt.  With take-home pay barely rising and inflation running at 4%, Britons were already facing their worst squeeze in disposable income for a generation. Doug McWilliams, chief executive of the Centre for Economic and Business Research, says that oil has knocked the coalition's strategy for six: "With 