37. However, that is not the end of this matter. As BWB can only require the removal of vessels unlawfully on the GUC, it is necessary to ask whether, even in the absence of an established riparian right to moor, the claimant, on the particular facts of this case, was committing any wrong at common law or under statute, which made what he was doing unlawful? If he was not, what power had BWB under s. 8 to require removal of the vessels?
38. I am alerted to the possibility that the claimant was not committing any wrong by a pithy observation of Sir Robert Megarry V.-C. in Metropolitan Police Commissioner [1979] 1 Ch 344 at 357C:-
"England, it may be said, is not a country where everything is forbidden except what is expressly permitted: it is a country where everything is permitted except what is expressly forbidden."
39. During the course of oral argument in this court it emerged that the multiplicity of issues generated by this dispute and the paper mountain of materials googled by Mr Moore had overshadowed the significance of that basic, if not totally accurate, maxim of English Law supportive of Mr Moore: what is not prohibited is permitted. That notion was at the core of the first element of AV Dicey's classic statement of the Rule of Law in 1885 (see Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution 8th Edition at p. 183), accentuating the need in law enforcement to prove distinct breaches of established law. The notion also survives Lord Bingham's re-formulation in The Rule of Law (2010), emphasising the accessibility of law and the need for it to be, so far as possible, intelligible, clear and predictable, so that the citizen knows when his actions would be unlawful. Those "rule of law" considerations apply to the power of BWB to require the claimant to remove vessels from the GUC, because its exercise depends on whether the vessels are moored unlawfully.
40. In this long running battle it is entirely understandable that BWB wishes to establish and exercise its statutory power to manage moorings on the GUC under pain of removal of unlawfully moored vessels. The point is that, if the claimant is doing nothing wrong in mooring his vessels alongside his part of the bank, then he has acted within the law, not contrary to it. If what he does is lawful, BWB has no power under the legislation, from which its statutory powers derive, to compel him to remove his vessels from their moorings.
