I know the lower house is selected through general elections, but what about the upper house?
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so, the House of Lords, the upper house of the UK, originally, was the landed nobility of the Kingdom. It was literally the place the Dukes, Earls and Barons came to talk, beseech, and pester the King, Game of Thrones style. The primary requirement was being a Noble, and ennobling someone automatically made them a Peer of the Realm, with rights in the house. However, over the centuries, the power has been successively reduced in relation to the House of Commons, the lower house, mostly to buy off discontent or the direct result of civil war.
The Current House of Lords still has a few members who are their by right of thier Inherited titles, but the majority of the members are Life Peers, whose peerage cannot be passed down to their heirs. They are created by the monarch on the advice of the current government*, and who are mostly former Members of Parliament (ie, politicians who were elected to sit in the lower house). Since most of the power in the current system sits in the Commons, being given a peerage is normally seen as a form of honourable retirement, often given to members of government when they are voted out of office as a parting “present” by the outgoing prime minister and the monarch.
Theirs also a bunch of bishops of the Church of England in the Lords, as “separation of church and state” is a American thing. Indeed, it was this integration of Anglicanism (and thus, the ability of Anglicanism to use the apparatus of state to push out other faiths) into the state that encouraged the Founding Fathers to add the religious freedom elements of the Bill of Rights.
Additionally, until very recently (2009), The Lords was the highest court of the UKs judiciary system (effectively, the formalised version of the aforementioned “pester the king about my problem” system) , and several members of the house were judges given a peerage in order to deal with this element of the lords remit. That has since been spun off into a separate Supreme Court of the UK, but that was still only 15 years ago.
In practice, the Lords can’t really *block* legislation anymore, not since the early 1900s and a stand off where the king of the time very nearly created *hundreds* of new life peers to get a majority and force reform though. What they can do is send it back to the commons with amendments and such, though theirs limits to how often they can do this to prevent endless amendment ping-pong
*when i say “government”, I’m talking about, roughly, what the americans would call the “administration”: the executive elements under the control of a single prime minister, and the senior cabinet ministers that are appointed by that PM, and would change when a new PM comes into power.
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